From their settlement at the mouth of the river to their hunting camps upstream, the Indians left traces of their lives and activities.

[9] In the sixteenth century, the expeditions of Pánfilo de Narváez and Hernando de Soto explored the coastal areas of Tampa Bay and visited the Indians, making the first written account and charting the first maps of the Alafia River.

[10] After the end of the Second Seminole War, white settlers began to arrive, starting with Benjamin Moody in 1843.

[10] Due to the river's tendency to undergo moderate to high-level flooding approximately twice a year, numerous residences in the vicinity have been constructed on stilts.

[13] In 1997 a dam atop a gypsum stack at a Mulberry Phosphates fertilizer plant broke, spilling 56 million gallons of acidic wastewater into the North Fork of the Alafia.

In addition to killing millions of fish and hundreds of acres of vegetation, the spill dumped 350 tons of nitrogen into Tampa Bay.

In 2007, the cost of closing both stacks was estimated to be $48 million, which will be paid to Mosaic by the Florida Department of Environmental Protection.

He described the moon shot taking place from 1,800-foot bluffs overlooking the Alafia, around what is now today's Bell Shoals Nature Preserve.