Homes for Sale in Palmetto, Florida

Palmetto sits along the Manatee River with a historic downtown that's held onto its small-city character even as the rest of the county has grown up around it. It's close enough to Ellenton and Parrish to feel like part of the same community, and different enough to have its own identity.

Palmetto began on the river. In 1868, Samuel Sparks Lamb bought land on the north bank of the Manatee River, laid out the town, and named it. Boats brought the mail, supplies, and new neighbors, and they carried produce and citrus out from the town’s docks. When the railroad arrived in 1902, downtown moved inland to the blocks near the depot.

Much of that town is still here. Downtown and the blocks along the river have been on the National Register of Historic Places since 1986, and Palmetto Historical Park keeps the 1880 post office and the 1914 Carnegie Library. On Riverside Drive, Lamb’s son lived in a house he ordered as a kit from Sears, Roebuck and Company in 1913; it came by rail and barge, and it still stands.

Today, unlike Parrish, Ellenton, and Terra Ceia, Palmetto is a city with its own government. Downtown, Eleanor’s Coffee & Cakes is in the original 1912 Palmetto State Bank building. On the river, Riverside Park has a public boat ramp. Riviera Dunes, a gated community inside the city, was built on the site of a dolomite mine that closed in 1974, and it has a 219-slip marina.

West of town, on Snead Island, Emerson Point Preserve has walking trails and the Portavant Mound, a temple mound built centuries ago by people of the Safety Harbor culture. Newer communities toward I-75, such as Coasterra and Silverstone North, have Palmetto addresses but are in unincorporated Manatee County.

Palmetto is one of the communities where our roots run deepest, with the same local team.