In 1783, while updating Gulf Coast navigational charts, Jose Antonio de Evia, a Spanish naval officer born in 1740, visited a Spanish fishing camp on this site and called it “Rancho de Juaquin.” Artifacts from the 18th and early 19th centuries, now in the Gulf Beaches Historical Museum in St. Pete Beach, indicate that fishermen used this camp and its water well until the 1840s. In 1918, while digging the house foundation at 612 Pass-a-Grille Way, workers discovered a complete Spanish olive jar that was donated to the St. Petersburg Museum of History in 1951 and authenticated as being from this site in 1999. Zephaniah Phillips, who lived from 1837 to 1903, was a Union Army veteran who, with his family, became the barrier islands’ first permanent settlers when they homesteaded here in 1886. The Phillips home built that year was moved from 612 to 608 Pass-a-Grille Way in 1918, and it was Pass-a-Grille’s first home and one of the first built on Pinellas’s Gulf Beaches.