Cedar Key is a city in Levy County, Florida, United States. The population was 702 at the 2010 census. The Cedar Keys are a cluster of islands close the mainland. Most of the developed Place of the city has been on Way Key in the past the halt of the 19th century. The Cedar Keys are named for the eastern red cedar Juniperus virginiana, once abundant in the area.

While evidence suggests human movement as far support as 500 BC, the first maps of the Place date to 1542, when it was labeled “Las Islas Sabines” by a Spanish cartographer. An archaeological dig at Shell Mound, 9 miles (14 km) north of Cedar Key, found artifacts dating support to 500 BC in the summit 10 feet (3.0 m) of the 28-foot-tall (8.5 m) mound. The and no-one else ancient burial found in Cedar Key was a 2,000-year-old skeleton found in 1999. Arrow heads and spear points dating from the Paleo period (12,000 years old) were collected by Cedar Key historian St. Clair Whitman and are displayed at the Cedar Key Museum State Park.

Followers of William Augustus Bowles, self-declared “Director General of the State of Muskogee”, built a watchtower in the vicinity of Cedar Key in 1801. The tower was destroyed by a Spanish force in 1802. In the mature leading up to the First Seminole War, the British subjects Alexander Arbuthnot and Robert Ambrister used the Cedar Keys to focus on supplies to the Seminoles. The Cedar Keys may have been a refuge for escaped slaves in the upfront 1820s, and an entry point for the illegal slave trade complex that decade.

During the Second Seminole War, the United States Army customary Fort No. 4 on the mainland adjoining the Cedar Keys. (The name “No. 4” was well ahead applied to a ship channel against the fort, and later to a railroad trestle and a highway bridge more than that channel.) In 1840, General Zachary Taylor requested the Cedar Keys be reserved for military use for the duration of the war, and that Seahorse Key be continually reserved for a lighthouse. In 1840, General Walker Keith Armistead, who had succeeded Zachary Taylor as commander of United States troops in the war, ordered construction of a hospital on what had become known as Depot Key. (The island’s herald may reflect the establishment of a depot there by Florida militia general Leigh Read. The primary depot for the U.S. Army in Florida at the get older was at Palatka, Florida.) Depot Key was the headquarters for the Army in Florida, but Fishburne states headquarters was not in a firm place, but wherever the commander was.