Lakeland

Lakeland is primarily a toponym. It may refer to:

People

Schools

Television

Published works

Lakeland, Florida

Lakeland is a city in Polk County, Florida, United States, located just outside Tampa. According to the 2013 U.S. Census Bureau estimate, the city had a population of 100,710. Lakeland is a principal city of the Lakeland–Winter Haven Metropolitan Statistical Area (coterminous with Polk County), which had an estimated population of 623,009 in July 2013 based on data from the University of Florida Bureau of Economic and Business Research. It is twinned with Richmond Hill, Ontario, Canada; Imabari, Ehime, Japan; Balti, Moldova; Portmore, Jamaica; and Chongming County, Shanghai, China as part of the Sister Cities program.

The area was home to Native American tribes. Lakeland was settled in the 1870s and expanded in the 1880s with the arrival of rail service. Lakeland is home to the 1,267 acre Circle B Bar Reserve.

History

Prehistory

The first Paleo-Indians reached the central Florida area near the end of the last ice age, as they followed big game south. As the ice melted and sea levels rose, these Native Americans ended up staying and thrived on the peninsula for thousands of years. By the time the first Spanish conquistadors arrived, over 250,000 Native Americans were living on the peninsula. Some of these first early tribes were the Tocobago, Timucua, and the Calusa. In 1527, a Spanish map showed a settlement near the Rio de la Paz. The arrival of the Spanish turned out to be disastrous to these Native American tribes. Within 150 years, the majority of the pre-Columbian Native American peoples of Florida had been wiped out. Those who had not succumbed to diseases such as smallpox or yellow fever were either killed or enslaved. Little is left of these first Native Americans cultures in Polk County except for scant archaeological records, including a few personal artifacts and shell mounds. Eventually, the remnants of these tribes would merge with Creek Indians who arrived from the north and become the Seminole Indian tribe.

Todd Bentley

Todd Bentley (born 10 January 1976) is a Canadian Christian evangelist. He was a key figure of the Lakeland Revival. After a brief period of retirement connected with the breakdown of his marriage and subsequent remarriage, he has returned to ministry.

Biography

Early life

Bentley is from Gibsons, British Columbia, a small community on the western coast of Canada. As told in his autobiography, his parents divorced while he was a child, and he struggled with drug and alcohol addiction.

Although the criminal records of juvenile offenders in Canada are normally protected from public disclosure, multiple media outlets have reported on Bentley's conviction, at age 15, of sexually assaulting a much-younger boy when Bentley was 13 years old. Bentley later said the original article, which appeared in The Report newsmagazine, was, in substance, true: "'They were sexual crimes,' Bentley admits. 'I was involved in a sexual assault ring. I turned around and did what happened to me. I was assaulted too.'"