24/7 Trauma & Biohazard Cleanup Near North Cedar Key Cedar Key, FL

Cedar Key is a small island city on Way Key in Levy County, part of a cluster of Gulf of Mexico islands called the Cedar Keys, named for the eastern red cedar trees that once grew abundantly there.

The community was first incorporated as the City of Atsena Otie in 1859, became the Town of Cedar Keys in 1869, and was officially incorporated as the City of Cedar Key in 1923.

In 1860 Cedar Key became the western terminus of the Florida Railroad, which ran clear across the state to Fernandina Beach on the Atlantic coast; the first train arrived on March 1, 1861, just weeks before the Civil War began.

Starting in 1858, Eberhard Faber, the Eagle Pencil Company, and other firms ran mills in Cedar Key that cut local cedar into pencil slats, which were shipped north to be made into pencils.

The Cedar Keys hurricane of September 29, 1896, swept a 10-foot storm surge over the town, killed more than 100 people, and destroyed the cedar mills, ending the town's pencil-industry boom.

Naturalist John Muir ended his famous 1,000-mile walk from Kentucky at Cedar Key in 1867, and wrote about reaching the Gulf of Mexico there in his memoir A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf.

President Herbert Hoover established the Cedar Keys National Wildlife Refuge in 1929, protecting several of the islands as a breeding ground for colonial birds, and the 1854 Seahorse Key lighthouse is now used as a University of Florida marine research station.

Cedar Key had 687 residents at the 2020 census, living in 316 households, and more than half of the city's official area is actually water.

After Florida banned large-scale net fishing in 1995, a government retraining program turned many Cedar Key fishermen into clam farmers; today the area produces about 90% of Florida's farm-raised clams.

Cedar Key School, run by the Levy County school board, is a single K-12 school serving the island community.