From about 800 to AD 1500, Amerindian peoples, possibly Timucans, occupied this area, built the temple mound and village middens, and lived from its natural resources within a complex spiritual and ceremonial way of life that sustained indigenous people here until their gradual disappearance across Southwest Florida by the mid 1700s. In 1814, a Cuban, Jose Maria Caldez, settled and farmed on the north side of the Oyster River, the earlier name of today’s Manatee River, possibly on Snead Island. In the 1840s, Edward Sneed, whose misspelled name was given to the island, homesteaded at the island’s eastern end and proved his claim in 1849. From 1866 to 1870, Robert Stewart Griffith and his wife Anna Webb built a home atop the temple mound and began cultivating bananas, citrus, and vegetables, but after the birth of their first child, Florence Mitchell, they moved to a new homestead in southern Sarasota County. In 1894, retired steamboat captain June Poitevent and his wife May purchased 940 acres, including the mound area, and his misspelled name, Portavant, was later given to the mound on government maps. In 1899, James Emerson, for whom Emerson Point is named, homesteaded 6-3/4 acres on the island’s extreme west point. From 1910 to 1922, the Poitevent property belonged to Peter and Golden Marine, who improved the home atop the mound and planted the avenue of royal palms from the temple mound to the river, before both drowned while swimming in the river in front of the mounds. From 1924 to 1991, Freeman H. Horton and Mabel Horton owned the property, enlarged the Griffith, Poitevent, and Marine house, greatly expanded agricultural cultivation, and, although they moved across the river to Bradenton in 1937, farming continued there into the early 1950s; Horton also carefully preserved the mound area, its trees, and its natural habitat. In 1991, the State of Florida and Manatee County purchased 195 acres, including the mound complex, from the Horton Estate, and in 1996 three acres at the island’s western tip were added to the park.