Weedon Island Preserve Cultural & Natural History Center

Weedon Island Preserve combines a wonderful nature experience on a site with fascinating historical significance. The Cultural and Natural History Center features classrooms and exhibit areas designed by anthropologists, historians and Native Americans to reflect the art and history of the area's first people. A group of low-lying islands history goes back thousands of years when early peoples such as the Timucuans and Manasotas made the island their home. The center combines a look at artifacts excavated from the site by the Smithsonian in the 1940s, as well as the chance to experience aspects of Native American culture in the exhibit gallery. The preserve also includes a nature experience with a four-mile canoe trail and three-mile hiking trail along with a fishing pier and waterfront picnic sites. Weedon Island Preserve is an expansive 3,000-acre region on Tampa Bay in north St. Petersburg comprised mostly of marine habitats with some uplands. It also is a site rich in cultural history. Indigenous peoples, including those during the Weeden Island Cultural Period, occupied this site for thousands of years. Today, the Preserve protects this wide diversity of natural and cultural resources for future generations including the Weedon Island Preserve Cultural and Natural History Center.