what county is port charlotte in
Port Charlotte is a census-designated place (CDP) in Charlotte County, Florida, United States. The population was 46,451 at the 2000 census. It is part of the Punta Gorda Metropolitan Statistical Area. The first people to call the Port Charlotte area home were the nomadic paleo-indians as they chased big game such as woolly mammoth southward during the last ice age around 10,000 BCE. At the time, Port Charlotte was not a coastal area; the peninsula of Florida was much wider than it is today and much drier. The Calusa thrived on the southwest Florida coast and numbered over 50,000 when the first Spaniards reached the peninsula in the 16th century.