Question: What Florida town became the center of the U.S. sponge-diving industry?
Answer: Tarpon Springs
In 1890 John K. Cheney, an early settler, founded the natural sponge industry in Tarpon Springs, which became one of the world’s largest. Beginning in 1905, Greek divers came to the city to work in the sponge industry. A blight in the sponge beds in the 1940s considerably reduced the fleet, which in its heyday comprised more than 200 vessels.
