On June 2, 1897, after railroads were built through the area, the Florida Legislature created Pasco County from the southern end of Hernando and named it for Samuel Pasco of Jefferson County, an England-born Confederate veteran, chairman of the 1885 Florida Constitutional Convention, former speaker of the Florida House, and United States senator elected in 1887. The area had been inhabited before 10,000 B.C., contained numerous Indian communities when Spanish explorers arrived in the 16th century, and was resettled by Seminole Indians by the late 1700's after earlier residents had disappeared. Fort King Road was cleared in 1825, and Fort Dade was built on the Withlacoochee River in 1836 after Maj. Francis Dade and his command were destroyed in December 1835. Most local Seminoles were removed to Oklahoma by the 1840's, when resettlement under the Armed Occupation Act began, and the fort was rebuilt in 1849 in what is now Dade City, where a post office had been established in 1845. In 1856, two children were massacred at the Bradley settlement, in one of the last recorded Indian attacks east of the Mississippi. Communities established in the county during the 1840's included Fort Dade, Tuckertown, and Lake Boddy; during the 1850's, Hopeville and Pleasant Plains; during the 1860s, Sapling Woods and Cedar Tree; and during the 1870's, Macon and Hudson's Landing. Judge Edmund Dunne founded San Antonio in 1881 as the center of his Catholic Colony; St. Joseph was established in 1883; St. Leo Abbey was founded in 1889, the college opened in 1890, and the town of St. Leo was incorporated in 1891. Port Richey and Gall Keys were founded in the 1880's, the Orange Belt Railway Co. established Odessa about 1888, Abbott Station became Zephyrhills in 1910, New Port Richey was founded in 1915, and Lacoochee, settled in 1888, became the home of Cummer Cypress Co. in 1922. Baillie's Bluff was a center of the Florida sponge industry until the late 1880's. During the Civil War, salt works along the Gulf coast were principal suppliers to the South, and from Reconstruction until after World War II, turpentine and lumber were major contributors to the local economy. The Bank of Pasco, established in 1889, was the county's first bank. The great freeze of 1895 destroyed the citrus groves; Sunnybrook Tobacco Co. at Dade City was the county's largest employer from 1908 until the 1920's, when black shank wiped out the industry; citrus cultivation later revived, and Pasco Packing Association was organized in 1936 and pioneered development of fruit juice concentrate. Severe freezes in 1983-84 again devastated the local citrus industry, while the livestock industry changed with the end of open range in 1947 and the introduction of new cattle breeds in the next decade. As population surged in western Pasco, the county's character changed dramatically, and by 1970 development of residential communities, mobile home parks, and villages was well underway countywide. County government met in a small rented building until 1889, when a frame courthouse was erected after Dade City was chosen county seat in a countywide referendum; in 1909 it was replaced by a domed brick courthouse designed by Artemus Roberts on Courthouse Square; a county building opened at New Port Richey in 1961; and a new courthouse in Dade City and an identical government center in western Pasco County were constructed in 1979-80.