The area of present-day Floral City has been inhabited by humans for thousands of years. Hernando De Soto passed through in 1539 and found the Indian village of Tocaste. From the late 1700s until the Second Seminole War of 1835-1842, the Seminole village of Cho-illy-hadjo, meaning Crazy Deer's Foot, stood here. The Armed Occupation Act of 1842 and statehood in 1845 brought American settlers who used the abundant timber, natural waterways, and rich farmland. By the 1860s, the area was part of the vast landholdings of John Paul Formy-Duval, a Confederate veteran and son of a French physician who had fled Napoleon's rule in the early 19th century, and Duval's house still stands as the oldest home in Citrus County. Senator Austin Mann and surveyor W. H. Havron surveyed and platted Floral City in 1883, naming it for its wildflowers and blooming trees. In the 1880s, its commercial center lay along Aroostook Way, between the New England Hotel at the south end on Orange Avenue and Lake Tsala Apopka at the north end, and the Orange State Canal, dug in 1884, linked steamboat transportation to the Withlacoochee River and beyond. After Plant System railway tracks were laid near the western edge of town in 1893, faster steam-powered trains overtook water travel, and the commercial center shifted uptown to the rail line. The Florida phosphate boom of the 1890s soon brought a dozen mines, swelling the village to nearly 10,000 people, larger than Miami at that time, but trade in local phosphate ore, shipped mainly to Germany, stopped abruptly when World War I began in 1914. After the phosphate industry collapsed, Floral City returned to its agrarian roots as a small rural community. As one of the oldest and most distinct settlements in Citrus County, the Floral City Historic District was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1993, and the oak canopy along Orange Avenue and Aroostook Way that helped define the district had been planted by residents in 1884, a year after the town was founded.