Lakeland is the most populous city in Polk County, Florida, part of the Tampa Bay Area, located along Interstate 4 east of Tampa. According to the 2020 U.S. Census Bureau release, the city had a population of 112,641. Lakeland is a principal city of the Lakeland–Winter Haven Metropolitan Statistical Area.

European-American settlers arrived in Lakeland from Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia and South Carolina in the 1870s. The city expanded in the 1880s bearing in mind the introduction of rail service, with the first freedmen railway workers settling here in 1883. They and European immigrants with came because of home development opportunities behind farming, citrus, cattle and phosphate industry developing. Lakeland is house to the 1,267-acre Circle B Bar Reserve.

The first Paleo-Indians reached the central Florida area near the halt of the last ice age, as they followed big game south. As the ice melted and sea levels rose, these Native Americans ended occurring staying and thrived upon the peninsula for thousands of years. By the become old the first Spanish conquistadors arrived, an estimated 350,000 Native Americans were active in what is now the make a clean breast of Florida. Some of these first in advance tribes were the Tocobago, Timucua, and Calusa.

In 1527, a Spanish map showed a settlement close the Rio de la Paz. The start of the Spanish turned out to be disastrous to these Native American tribes. Within 150 years, the majority of the pre-Columbian Native American peoples of Florida had been wiped out. Those who had not succumbed to diseases such as smallpox or yellowish-brown fever were either killed or enslaved. Little is left of these first Native Americans cultures in Polk County except for scant archaeological records, including a few personal artifacts and shell mounds. Eventually, the remnants of these tribes merged taking into account the Creek Indians who had arrived from the north and became the Seminole Indian tribe.