City of Bartow careers

About 20,000 people and one big institution depend on Bartow: the city is the seat of Polk County, one of Florida's geographically largest counties with more than 585,000 residents. The town sits 40 miles east of Tampa and 60 southwest of Orlando, at the crossing of U.S. 98 and State Road 60, and the business of county government anchors the working life of the town around it.

The city predates almost everything around it. Founded in October 1851 as Fort Blount, a stockade put up by Readding Blount and his family on the frontier, it was renamed in 1867 for Francis S. Bartow, the first Confederate officer to die in the Civil War, a naming history the city's own page lays out matter-of-factly rather than leaving it to be found elsewhere. Civic ambition showed early; the Summerlin Institute, opened in 1887 and now Bartow High School, was the first brick schoolhouse south of Jacksonville. The economy around city hall still leans on the county's traditional mainstays of phosphate, citrus, and cattle. For a public-sector applicant the picture is a small municipal government in a government town: the county provides the courthouse jobs, and the city government hires for the municipal services running underneath them.