Category: Hidden North Florida

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The Spring That Built a Town

White Springs is a small town today. It was a small town then, too, at least by any national measure. But for a brief period around the turn of the twentieth century, it became something much larger than its population would suggest. The reason was the spring.

People came to White Springs to drink the mineral water, bathe in it, and seek relief from whatever ailments they believed the water might cure. They came by stagecoach and later by train. They stayed in hotels and boarding houses, ate in restaurants, shopped in town, and spent days or weeks beside the Suwannee.

The spring did not just give White Springs its name. For a time, it gave the town its economy. By 1910, White Springs had at least thirteen hotels and boarding houses. There were shops, entertainment, dining rooms, transportation services, and a growing resort economy built around visitors coming to take the waters. The town had 1,177 residents that year. Today, White Springs has fewer than 800.

That difference does not prove that the spring alone made or unmade the town. White Springs also had lumber, agriculture, railroads, and other industries that shaped its fortunes. Fire, changing travel patterns, highways, and the rise of other Florida destinations all played a part in what happened next.

Still, the numbers hint at just how much activity once revolved around the spring. At the center of it all was the spring house.

What survives today is a striking shell of what it once was. The old walls still rise beside the Suwannee, enclosing a place that once drew visitors from across the country. Historic photographs show crowds, bathing platforms, and an elaborate structure built around water that flowed with enough force to make the spring itself the centerpiece of town life. And that is where the story becomes harder to ignore. The spring barely flows now.

The first time you see the old spring house, it can be difficult to reconcile the ruins with the stories. You can understand the architecture. You can imagine the hotels. You can picture people arriving by train and walking toward the water. But then you look down. The thing that made all of this possible is barely there.

White Sulphur Spring once discharged large quantities of water from the Floridan aquifer. Over the twentieth century, that flow became weaker and less reliable. By 1977, the spring stopped flowing altogether for the first time on record.

The reasons are more complicated than any single explanation. Spring flow depends on pressure in the aquifer below us. Rainfall matters. Drought matters. So does groundwater pumping. And in White Springs, there is another part of the story just north of town.

The phosphate mine opened in the 1960s, and groundwater associated with its operations has long been pumped from the same regional aquifer system that feeds springs like White Sulphur. Later groundwater modeling found that phosphate pumping had a measurable effect on White Springs, and that removing that pumping in the model allowed spring flow to recover significantly.

That does not mean every gallon pumped by the mine would otherwise have come bubbling out of White Sulphur Spring. Groundwater does not work that neatly. But it does mean the connection is more than speculation.

Part of me wants the answer to be simple. Shut down the mine, let the aquifer recover, and see whether the spring that made White Springs famous could flow again. I would love to see that happen.

But I also grew up in this part of North Florida, and I know the other side of that equation. The phosphate industry has provided generations of jobs across Hamilton, Suwannee, and the surrounding counties. Members of my own family have worked there. So have the families of people I grew up with. For a rural community, those jobs are not an abstraction.

That does not make the loss of the spring less important. It does not mean groundwater impacts should be ignored. It simply means the question cannot honestly be considered in a vacuum. I can wish the spring flowed the way it once did and still understand why the answer is more complicated than simply closing the gates at the mine. That may be the part of White Springs’ story I find most interesting now.

The town was once built around a natural feature powerful enough to shape its economy, its identity, and the way outsiders saw it. The spring house still stands. The spring itself is barely a trickle.

The strangest thing about visiting the old spring house today is that the building outlived the water it was built around. And yet the story is not completely finished. White Springs is still here. So is the spring. The question now is what both of them become next.

Experience It

The old spring house sits beside the Suwannee River in White Springs, a short drive from Anasa and close to Stephen Foster Folk Culture Center State Park.

Walk down to the spring house and spend a little time there before heading toward the river. Look at the walls, the scale of the enclosure, and the old photographs .

Then look at the water that remains. It is one of the clearest places in North Florida to see how dramatically a landscape can change while the structures around it remain.

If you are staying at Anasa, White Springs makes an easy half-day outing and pairs naturally with a walk through Stephen Foster, a stop at the Telford Hotel, or a drive along the Suwannee. This is one of those places where the story becomes easier to understand once you stand inside it.

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The Last Hotel Standing

The Telford Hotel

White Springs once had more hotels and boarding houses than you would ever guess from driving through today.

At the height of its resort years, visitors came for the mineral spring, for the promise of health, and for the kind of social life that made this little town on the Suwannee feel much larger than it was. They stayed in hotels, took the waters, walked the town, and gathered around a spring that had become famous well beyond North Florida. Most of those hotels are gone now. The Telford is the one that stayed.

Construction began in 1902, during the height of White Springs’ resort era. The hotel was associated with William Butler Telford, and it stood out because it was built differently. While so much of the town was still wood, the Telford was White Springs’ first masonry hotel, built with red brick framing around pale, irregular stone.

That stonework is one of the things I like most about the building. It has always reminded me of the surviving masonry ruins at Suwannee Springs. There, another resort town had already learned how vulnerable large wooden hotels could be. A huge wooden hotel burned in 1884 and was replaced by a smaller brick-and-stone hotel. That second hotel burned in 1901, just before construction began on the Telford.

I have found no evidence that the two hotels shared a builder, materials, or any direct connection. But they belonged to the same era and the same river country, and both reflect a time when permanence was beginning to matter.

The Telford’s timing was fortunate. In 1911, fire swept through White Springs and destroyed more than thirty buildings, including four hotels, businesses, homes, and the high school. The Telford survived. That alone would have made it unusual, but the building’s real story is not simply that it escaped one fire. It is that people kept finding reasons for it to remain useful.

Over the years, the Telford served not only as a hotel but also as a nursing home, private residence, restaurant, bed-and-breakfast, and even the headquarters of a broadcasting company. Each new use gave the old building another chance to survive while so much of the White Springs resort era disappeared around it.

By 1910, White Springs had at least thirteen hotels and boarding houses. Today, the Telford is the only historic hotel from that boom still standing. That is what makes the building more than just an attractive old structure. It is one of the few places where you can still physically see the White Springs described in old advertisements and newspapers.

There is another reason the name caught my attention. My favorite spring in North Florida is Telford Spring, named for Reverend William Brazelton Telford. My favorite old building in White Springs happens to carry the same last name.

The hotel’s William Butler Telford and Reverend William Brazelton Telford even shared the same first name and middle initial, and both appear to have come from the same broader South Carolina Telford family. They were likely related, although I have not yet been able to document exactly how. For now, it is one of those family-history threads that is visible enough to notice, but not quite clear enough to tie into a neat knot.

The Telford was also part of the same experience that brought people to White Springs in the first place. Visitors came to drink the mineral water, bathe in the spring, seek treatments, and stay in town while they did it. The hotel opened just as White Springs was transforming its spring facilities into the elaborate spring house that would become the town’s centerpiece.

The hotel was where people stayed. The spring was why many of them came. Even some famous names passed through. An old guest register from 1913 includes the names of former presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, a reminder that White Springs once attracted visitors from far beyond this part of Florida.

That is difficult to picture now, which may be exactly why I like the Telford so much. It gives the imagination something solid to work with. You can stand in front of it and see the stone, the brick, the porches, and the scale of the building and understand that White Springs was once a very different place.

And the story is not entirely finished. White Springs is once again asking what the Telford might become next. I have caught myself wondering the same thing. An old hotel in a historic spring town is exactly the sort of thing I should probably appreciate from a safe financial distance. Still, it is hard not to imagine what a place like this could become with the right kind of care. For more than a century, people have kept finding new reasons for the Telford to survive. I hope they find one more.

Experience It

The Telford Hotel stands in the historic center of White Springs, a short drive from Anasa. It is close to the old spring house, Stephen Foster Folk Culture Center State Park, and the Suwannee River, which makes White Springs an easy half-day outing during a stay.

Walk past the hotel, continue toward the old spring house, and then down toward the river. Try to picture the streets filled with visitors moving between hotels, shops, porches, dining rooms, and the spring itself.

White Springs is one of the easiest places near Anasa to experience the kind of North Florida I keep writing about: a place where the history is still visible if you slow down enough to notice it. The Telford is one of the best places to begin.

Stay nearby, explore slowly.
Anasa is a nature hotel near Live Oak, created for weekends built around places like this.

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When White Springs Was Famous

It is difficult to look at White Springs today and imagine what it once was. The town still sits quietly beside the Suwannee River, surrounded by the same North Florida woods that have always defined this part of the state. Drive through today and you might notice the historic buildings, the entrance to Stephen Foster Folk Culture Center State Park, or the old spring house beside the river.

What is harder to imagine are the crowds. There was a time when people traveled to White Springs from across the South specifically to spend their vacations here. They arrived by stagecoach and later by train, checked into hotels and boarding houses, dressed for dinner, attended dances, shopped along the streets and, most importantly, came to drink and bathe in water that they believed could make them well.

Long before Florida tourism meant beaches, theme parks or winter condominiums, people were already coming here. They came for a spring.

The Water That Started It

The sulfur spring beside the Suwannee had been known long before there was a town around it. Local traditions describe Indigenous people regarding the spring as a place of healing, and later settlers inherited the belief that its mineral-rich water possessed medicinal qualities.

By the early 1800s, those claims were spreading well beyond North Florida. The water was promoted as a treatment for ailments ranging from rheumatism and kidney problems to nervous disorders.

It sounds strange through modern ears, but mineral-spring tourism was a serious business in the nineteenth century. People traveled great distances to places where they believed the water could restore their health.

In the 1830s, Bryant Sheffield acquired the spring and ferry crossing and eventually built a hotel and spring house beside the water. What began as a rural spring on the Suwannee was becoming a destination. Florida State Parks describes White Springs as Florida’s first tourist attraction, and a USGS history calls it the state’s first tourist destination.

A Resort Town on the Suwannee

By the late nineteenth century, White Springs looked very different from the quiet town we know today. Visitors first arrived by stagecoach, but the railroad made the town much more accessible. Hotels and boarding houses multiplied as travelers came for the water, the climate and the chance to spend days along the Suwannee.

By the 1880s, visitors could choose from roughly 500 hotel and boarding-house rooms. Later accounts describe a town with luxury hotels, shops, dining, dances, tennis, skating and other entertainment built around the resort trade.

Try to picture that the next time you drive through White Springs. Instead of quiet streets, imagine travelers stepping off trains with luggage. Imagine hotel porches filled with guests escaping the heat of the day. Imagine people strolling toward the spring dressed for an afternoon in a resort town.

At the center of almost everything was the water. The spring eventually became surrounded by an elaborate multi-level bathhouse. Visitors could change clothes, be examined by physicians and descend toward the water from galleries surrounding the spring. The surviving concrete and coquina structure dates to the early twentieth century, although what remains today is only part of what visitors would once have seen.

We will come back to that spring house in another Field Note, because it deserves a story of its own. So does one of the hotels.

The Town the Spring Built

What interests me most about White Springs is how completely one natural feature shaped the town around it. The spring created the destination. The visitors created demand for hotels, restaurants, shops and entertainment. Transportation followed the visitors, and an entire local economy grew around the idea that this particular water was worth traveling to experience.

For a while, White Springs was exactly the kind of place people pictured when they thought about taking a restorative trip to Florida. Then tastes changed. By the 1930s, Americans were losing interest in mineral-spring cures, and the resort culture that had supported White Springs began fading with them. The hotels disappeared one by one, and the crowds that had once filled the town largely stopped coming.

White Springs did not disappear like Columbus or Ellaville. Instead, it became something quieter. That may make the traces of its former life even more interesting, because so much of the old town is still there if you know what you are looking for.

Experience It

The best way to begin exploring this story is simply to walk around White Springs with the resort era in mind. Visit the old spring house beside the Suwannee and imagine it filled with people who had traveled there specifically for the water. Walk through the historic part of town and notice the older homes and buildings that remain from an era when visitors arrived with trunks instead of overnight bags. Then stand for a while beside the river.

It is hard to reconcile the quiet of White Springs today with the town that once welcomed thousands of visitors seeking health, recreation and a few days away from ordinary life.

That contrast is exactly what makes the place worth knowing. Before Florida became famous for beaches, amusement parks and sunshine, one of its first tourist destinations was a small town on the Suwannee River. And it all began with a spring.

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The First Cool Morning

Fall arrived on the calendar earlier this week, but to me, this morning North Florida finally felt like it.

For the first time in months, I stepped outside and the air was unmistakably different. It was not cold, and by most standards it probably was not even especially cool, but after a long North Florida summer, it felt like a change.

The heat had backed off. The humidity had loosened its grip. For once, stepping outside did not feel like standing on the face of the sun. I did not need to check the temperature to know it. The first cool morning had arrived.

Fall Arrives Differently Here

In other parts of the country, fall seems to announce itself more dramatically. Leaves change color, jackets come out, and the air turns crisp enough that there is no mistaking the season. North Florida is more subtle.

The change usually begins in the mornings, when the air feels a little lighter and the heat no longer presses down quite as hard. Before long, the evenings begin to change too. You stay outside a little longer. The sunlight seems softer. Familiar places start to feel different simply because being outside is comfortable again.

The afternoons may still remind us that summer has not completely disappeared, but something has shifted. This morning was the first time I really felt it.

The Season You Feel Before You See

Fall in North Florida is often something you feel before you really see it. The trees do not suddenly transform overnight. Instead, the signs arrive gradually. The morning air cools, the evenings become more inviting, and the light begins to sit a little lower in the sky.

After a long summer, those small changes matter. You start thinking about drinking coffee outside again, taking longer walks, eating dinner beneath the trees, and eventually lighting the first fire of the season. The woods begin to feel less like somewhere you pass through quickly and more like somewhere you want to stay for a while.

Nothing about the landscape has changed dramatically since yesterday. Yet this morning, the same place felt different.

Why the First Morning Matters

I think the first cool morning feels important because summer lasts so long here. For months, we plan around the heat. We look for shade, retreat inside during the hottest part of the day, and wait for the season when being outdoors becomes easy again.

Then one morning, almost without warning, the air changes. The day will probably warm up later. We may even get another stretch of hot weather before fall really settles in.

But that does not take anything away from this morning. For a little while, summer loosened its grip. And after waiting for it, I noticed.

Experience It

If you are reading this on the morning it arrives, go outside before the day warms up. Make a cup of coffee and sit somewhere quiet. Listen to the woods. Notice the air against your skin and the way familiar places feel slightly different after months of heat.

There is no need to turn it into a hike, a trip, or something to accomplish. Sometimes the experience is simply staying outside a little longer than you normally would.

Fall rarely arrives in North Florida all at once. Sometimes it arrives on an ordinary Thursday morning, when you open the door and realize the air has finally changed. Today was that morning.

— Dion, Anasa founder

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The Towns That Disappeared

On opposite sides of the Suwannee River, two towns once faced each other. One sat on the east side of the Suwannee, near what is now Suwannee River State Park. The other grew across the river, near the meeting of the Suwannee and Withlacoochee. Columbus came first. Then Ellaville rose. For a time, both existed together. And eventually, both disappeared.

Today, if you drive through the area, you mostly see woods, river and old roads. It takes some imagination to understand that this quiet corner of North Florida once held two communities, each important in its own time.

Years ago, when my son was still little, I took him out on the trails at Ellaville hoping we might find the ruins of George Drew’s mansion. We never made it that far. He had had enough walking, so we turned around. Now he is off at college, and I still remember how peaceful and beautiful those woods felt. A few years later, in 2019, I stopped and photographed the historical marker beside the road. In large letters, it says:

THE TOWN OF ELLAVILLE

Looking back at that picture now, what strikes me is how little of a town you can see behind it. There are trees, Spanish moss, grass and the familiar woods of North Florida. But Ellaville was not the first town here.

Before Ellaville, There Was Columbus

Columbus developed on the east side of the Suwannee in the early 1840s. Its location made sense because several different ways of moving through North Florida came together there. River traffic, ferries, stagecoach roads and mail routes all converged around the crossing, and later the railroad added another layer of importance.

Columbus became a place where cotton, goods, people and information moved through the region. Steamboats traveled the river. Stagecoaches connected the community with other settlements. A ferry carried people across the Suwannee.

By the Civil War, the railroad crossing was important enough that Confederate earthworks were built nearby to help defend it. For a while, Columbus seemed well positioned to last. Then a new town began growing across the river.

Ellaville Rises

After the Civil War, George Franklin Drew established a large sawmill and manufacturing operation on the opposite side of the Suwannee. North Florida was covered in yellow pine, and Drew built an economy around it. A town grew around the mill.

For several years, Columbus and the new settlement existed across the river from one another. One was an older transportation and river community. The other was a newer industrial town built around timber. Then the center of gravity began to shift.

In 1867, the Columbus post office was moved across the Suwannee to serve the growing sawmill complex, although it kept the Columbus name for a few more years. In 1872, the post office officially became Ellaville. By the early 1870s, Columbus had largely faded. Ellaville had taken its place.

George Drew built a substantial home there in 1868. Less than a decade later, he became governor of Florida. That detail helps me understand the scale of the place. Ellaville was not simply a small settlement beside a mill. For a time, it was one of the more important communities in this part of North Florida.

As Long as the Yellow Pine Lasted

Ellaville’s historical marker tells its story with an unusually simple sentence:

“Ellaville flourished as long as yellow pine lasted.”

There is almost an entire history of North Florida contained in those words. The forests that created Ellaville’s prosperity were also finite. As the surrounding timber was cut, the economic reason for the town began to disappear with it.

Ellaville declined after 1900. People left. Businesses closed. Houses vanished. The post office survived into the 1940s, but the town’s real boom had ended long before then. George Drew’s mansion remained standing after much of Ellaville had faded. Photographs from the twentieth century show the once-impressive house slowly deteriorating before it disappeared around 1970. The woods kept moving back in. Just as they had around Columbus before it.

What Stayed

Not everything disappeared. At Columbus, traces remain inside Suwannee River State Park: the cemetery, earthworks, old roads and places where people once approached the river. At Ellaville, the landscape is full of its own clues.

One of them is Suwanacoochee Spring. I remember paddling the Suwannee one day and passing the spring where its water enters the Withlacoochee. I was moving parallel to the shoreline when the outflow hit the side of my kayak hard enough that it nearly tipped me over.

That was my introduction to Suwanacoochee before I understood much about its connection to Ellaville. The walls around the spring are still there. The town is gone. The spring is not. Nearby, scattered ruins, old pathways and the landscape itself tell the same story in different ways. Once you know what was here, the empty spaces stop feeling quite so empty.

Two Towns, One River

What I find most interesting is how quickly the whole sequence happened. Columbus rose first, built around movement: ferries, stagecoaches, river commerce and later the railroad. Then Ellaville rose across the river, built around timber, manufacturing and transportation.

For a while, both towns existed at the same time. Then Columbus faded. A few decades later, Ellaville began fading too. Two towns rose along the same stretch of river, one after the other, and neither lasted very long.

The river stayed through all of it. The Suwannee and Withlacoochee kept flowing while one community rose, another replaced it, and eventually both disappeared back into the landscape.

That is one of the things I have come to love about exploring North Florida. Sometimes the most ordinary-looking woods are not ordinary at all. Sometimes they are the remains of one town. Sometimes two.

Experience It

This is a good place to explore as a pair. Start at Suwannee River State Park and look for the traces of Columbus: the cemetery, old roads and earthworks. As you walk, think about the stagecoaches, ferries and river traffic that once made this a crossroads.

Then walk across the old U.S. 90 bridge over the Suwannee into Ellaville. The bridge itself came much later than either town, but crossing the river on foot gives you a physical sense of just how close these two communities were.

On the Ellaville side, stop at the historical marker and walk the trails toward the Drew Mansion ruins. Find Suwanacoochee Spring near the meeting of the Suwannee and Withlacoochee and notice the walls still surrounding part of the water.

Neither place gives up its story immediately. That is part of what makes them worth visiting. You have to slow down, look carefully and imagine what is no longer there. Two towns once occupied this stretch of river. Now the river is what remains.

— Dion, Anasa founder

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I Knew Sheck Exley Before I Knew Who He Was

For years, Sheck Exley existed in my memory as one of my high school math teachers. He was eccentric, interesting, and hard to forget. He had sayings he seemed to keep ready for almost any situation, including one I still remember clearly: “It’s my way or the highway.”

I knew he was involved in karate. I knew he had a personality that could fill a classroom. What I did not know was that he was also one of the most accomplished cave divers in the world. At the time, I had no idea.

The Blackboard

I remember one day in his class when he had students come to the blackboard to work algebra problems. When my turn came, I was feeling pretty confident. The equation looked easy, so I walked quickly to the board, worked it out, and was already prepared to enjoy being right. Except I wasn’t.

I had made some stupid little mistake. Sheck responded with one of those funny sayings he always seemed to have ready. I wish I could remember exactly what he said. Whatever it was, I remember slumping back into my seat, slightly embarrassed and already biding my time until I could get another chance to demonstrate my brilliance.

Looking back, what strikes me is that he could have skewered me. I had walked to that board with enough teenage arrogance to make myself an inviting target. He could have made the mistake hurt a lot more than it did. Instead, he showed me some grace and let me sit down. That is the Sheck Exley I knew then.

Meeting Him Again

Some years after high school, I was at the house of a friend of a friend when I noticed one of Sheck’s books sitting on the coffee table. I picked it up and starting looking through the book. And pretty much stopped participating in whatever everyone else was doing.

I sat there reading about cave exploration and underwater passages hidden beneath the North Florida landscape I had grown up around. The more I read, the stranger the experience became. This was Sheck Exley, my math teacher. Except it felt like I was reading about someone I had never met.

The person in those pages seemed almost entirely new to me. I had sat in his classroom. I knew his sayings. I knew about the karate club. I had even had my own small encounter with his sense of humor at the blackboard. But I had no idea how much of his life existed somewhere else entirely.

A Modern-Day Explorer in Our Own Backyard

What makes that realization even stranger is how often his story now intersects with places that were already part of my own life.

Telford Spring was one of those places. I spent countless childhood afternoons there, swimming through the limestone opening beneath the natural bridge and never imagining how far the cave system extended beyond what I could see. Years later, I learned that Sheck was one of the divers involved in exploring and surveying those passages.

Peacock Springs is another. My dad took my sister and me there long before it became a state park, back when the dirt road through the woods was part of the adventure. Today, Peacock is known around the world for its cave system, and there is a plaque there honoring Sheck.

Then there is Falmouth, another spring with an enormous hidden world beneath what looks like a small patch of water at the surface.

The more I learn about these places, the more often his name appears.

We tend to imagine explorers as people from another century, crossing oceans, climbing mountains, or disappearing into blank spaces on old maps. But Sheck was a modern-day explorer working right here in our own backyard, pushing into underwater passages beneath North Florida that most people would never see.

It is an odd feeling to keep encountering someone years after they are gone.

Someone I Had Never Met

Sheck died in 1994 while attempting an extraordinarily deep dive in Mexico. By the time I really understood the scale of what he had accomplished, he was already gone.

That is probably why the coffee-table book memory has stayed with me. I was not discovering a famous cave diver who happened to share a name with one of my old teachers. I was discovering that one of my old teachers had been this person all along.

There is something humbling about realizing how little we may know about the people sitting right in front of us. I knew Sheck Exley. And in another sense, I did not know him at all.

Experience It

If you visit Wes Skiles Peacock Springs State Park, look for the plaque honoring Sheck Exley. Then walk the interpretive trail that follows the cave system beneath the woods. From the surface, the landscape looks quiet and ordinary: pines, oaks, sandy trails, and patches of water tucked into the forest. But beneath your feet is another world.

That was the world Sheck spent so much of his life exploring. And if you want to understand him beyond the plaque, find one of his books and read it.

That is how I first discovered the other Sheck Exley. Years after sitting in his classroom, I picked up one of his books from a coffee table and found myself completely absorbed in the story of a modern-day explorer I had somehow already met.

For me, Peacock connects those two versions of the same person: the eccentric math teacher I remember from a classroom and the explorer whose name I now keep finding beneath the places I grew up around.

Sometimes we discover hidden stories in landscapes. Sometimes we discover them in people. And sometimes it takes years to realize just how much was there all along.

— Dion, Anasa founder

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Baptizing Spring

I had driven past Baptizing Spring more times than I could count before I ever saw it.

It sits in an undeveloped part of Peacock Springs State Park, across the road from Peacock Springs and Orange Grove Sink. Those places are destinations, drawing people to swim, dive, and explore some of North Florida’s remarkable waters.

Baptizing Spring is different. The spring itself is small, especially by North Florida standards, and isn’t really suited for swimming. Even if it were easier to reach, it probably would never become the kind of spring people plan a day around.

What makes Baptizing Spring remarkable isn’t really the spring at all. It’s the stories hidden around, and beneath, it.

I first visited about five years ago after asking park management for permission to go back there. I knew the name, but I knew almost nothing about its history. I certainly didn’t realize that hidden in those woods was the site of a seventeenth-century Spanish mission and a Native community whose story began more than two hundred years before the Charles family established their ferry on the Suwannee.

In the early 1600s, Spanish Franciscan missionaries established San Juan de Guacara here among the Native people already living in this part of Florida. Archaeological excavations at Baptizing Spring have uncovered evidence of structures, hearths, storage areas, and other features of everyday life. This wasn’t simply a place where missionaries occasionally stopped. It was a community.

That discovery changed the way I thought about the history of this area. It’s easy to imagine North Florida’s story beginning with settlers, ferries, railroads, and the small towns we know today. In reality, people had been living, traveling, trading, and building communities across this landscape for centuries before Florida became an American territory.

San Juan de Guacara was part of the Spanish mission system that stretched across northern Florida. The missions brought Christianity, but they were also part of Spain’s colonial system, placing growing demands on the Native communities around them. Those tensions eventually contributed to the Timucua rebellion against Spanish authority in 1656, after which the mission at Baptizing Spring was abandoned and relocated west toward an important crossing of the Suwannee River.

That caught my attention because it takes us back to the subject of our last Field Note: Charles Spring.

More than 150 years before Reuben and Rebecca Charles established their ferry there, people had already recognized the importance of that same area as a crossing of the Suwannee. Long before Bellamy Road reached the river, this landscape was already connecting people.

There may even be a connection between San Juan de Guacara and the name Suwannee itself. The origin of the word isn’t settled, but one theory traces it to the Spanish San Juan. Historical maps show the river under that name and later variations before spellings resembling Suwannee began to appear. We may never know the answer with certainty, but the possibility adds another fascinating layer to the story of this otherwise unassuming place.

Baptizing Spring has another surprising connection, although this one is underground.

In 2010, cave divers connected Baptizing Spring to the extensive Peacock Springs cave system across the road. From the surface, the two places seem separate. Peacock is one of Florida’s best-known cave-diving destinations, while Baptizing Spring is a small spring hidden in undeveloped woods. Beneath the ground, however, they’re part of the same system.

I love that contrast because it captures Baptizing Spring perfectly. Almost everything interesting about this little spring is something you cannot see at first glance. Its water connects underground to Peacock Springs, its woods conceal the remains of a community that existed four centuries ago, and its history reaches west toward the Suwannee.

The spring may be small, but its connections are anything but.

Experience It

Baptizing Spring itself will probably never be a North Florida destination, and perhaps that’s fitting. It also isn’t a place I would encourage anyone to simply wander into. The spring lies in an undeveloped part of the state park, and when I visited, I first asked park management for permission. More importantly, it is an archaeological site worth protecting.

Fortunately, you don’t have to visit Baptizing Spring itself to experience the landscape that makes its story meaningful.

Visit Peacock Springs and Orange Grove Sink across the road. Walk beneath the oaks and pines, look at the limestone beneath your feet, and spend some time around the water. While you’re there, remember that the cave passages beneath you extend beyond the places you can see and connect to that little spring hidden in the woods nearby.

Then consider another connection you can’t see. More than four centuries ago, people were living and building a community in those same woods.

When I finally visited Baptizing Spring about five years ago, I thought I was simply seeing an obscure spring I had driven past for years. I know now that its obscurity is part of what makes it so interesting.

Some places are worth knowing about even if you never visit them. Baptizing Spring is one of those places.

– Dion, Anasa Founder

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Crossing the Suwannee

Every time I cross the Suwannee River, I do the same thing.

It usually starts with the highway signs. If you’ve driven across the Suwannee in Florida, you’ve probably noticed them, the signs with musical notes, a nod to the song that made this river famous.

And almost without fail, I start singing: Way down upon the Suwannee River… I’ve done it for years.

But more recently I found myself wondering something I’d somehow never really thought about: How did people get across before there were bridges?

It occurred to me that I’d crossed the Suwannee hundreds of times. I knew the song. I knew the river. I’d even jumped off one of its bridges.

But I’d never really thought about the crossing itself. 

Once you look at a map, the importance of the Suwannee becomes obvious. The river begins in Georgia and winds south through North Florida before emptying into the Gulf. Travel west across this part of Florida and, sooner or later, you have to cross it. To truly go around it, you’d have to head north into Georgia before coming back down into Florida.

Today, crossing hardly qualifies as an obstacle. We drive across a bridge in less than a minute. But for much of Florida’s history, it was a very different problem. Travelers had to find a crossing. And at Suwannee Springs, you can still see how four generations of Floridians solved it.

The earliest crossing at Suwannee Springs was a ferry. Before bridges connected the two banks, travelers arriving here had to stop and wait to be carried across. Eventually, the ferry was replaced by a bridge. That bridge was replaced by another. And that one eventually gave way to the modern crossing we use today.

Four generations of crossings, all within the same small stretch of river. Pieces of that history are still there. Near the spring, old rusted piers stand by the river, the remains of the first bridge that once carried travelers from one bank to the other.

Just downstream stands its successor, an old steel truss bridge that no longer carries traffic. Most locals know it simply as the Graffiti Bridge. And I knew that bridge long before I knew its history. When I was a teenager, the Graffiti Bridge was a popular swimming spot. And yes, we jumped off it into the Suwannee. More than once.

I’m certainly not recommending anyone repeat that particular part of the experience today. But whenever someone asks that old parental question, “If your friends jumped off a bridge, would you?” I suppose I have to answer honestly. Yes!

At the time, I wasn’t thinking about the bridge as history. It was simply part of growing up around the Suwannee. I didn’t know that another bridge had stood before it. I certainly wasn’t thinking about the ferry that came before either of them. It was just the river.

And maybe that’s what I find most interesting about these places. Sometimes we can know somewhere our entire lives without really knowing its story.

Think about how differently people have experienced this one spot.

There was a time when a traveler arrived at the Suwannee and had to stop. Was the ferry running? Was the river too high? How long would the crossing take?

Eventually, travelers crossed on a bridge. Years later, teenagers like me jumped from another one into the water below.

Today, most of us pass over the same river on a modern highway without giving the crossing much thought at all. The river is still there. The problem hasn’t changed. Every generation has simply found a different way across.

Experience It

The next time you’re near Suwannee Springs, don’t just cross the river. Stop for a while. Walk down to the spring and look out across the Suwannee. Imagine arriving here before there was a bridge and realizing that your journey couldn’t continue until someone carried you to the other side.

Look for the old bridge piers by the river. Then walk over to the Graffiti Bridge and stand on a crossing that itself became obsolete when the next generation built another one nearby. But please don’t follow my teenage example and jump off it!

Instead, take a few minutes to notice something that’s easy to miss: In one small stretch of the Suwannee, you can see the story of how North Florida learned to cross a river. And when you get back in the car and drive across the newest bridge, maybe do what I do. Sing a few words.

Way down upon the Suwannee River…

Only now, look down. And think about all the people who had to figure out how to get to the other side.

— Dion

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The Rivers That Disappear

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the Cody Scarp. Millions of years ago, it was Florida’s coastline. Today, in many places, it’s little more than a subtle change in elevation. If you didn’t know it was there, you could drive across it without ever noticing.

But the more I learn about North Florida, the more I realize just how many of the things I love about this place trace back to that ancient shoreline. The springs. The sinkholes. The caves. Even the rivers.

Most rivers have somewhere to go. They flow into another river. A lake. Eventually, the sea.

But in North Florida, rivers begin doing something unusual when they reach the Cody Scarp. Some disappear.

The Santa Fe River flows normally until it reaches a place called River Sink. There, an entire river vanishes underground. Several miles later, it returns at River Rise and continues on toward the Suwannee.

Farther north, the Alapaha River reaches Dead River Sink. During periods of low water, so much water disappears into the limestone that long stretches of the riverbed can become dry.

The Aucilla River may be stranger still. It disappears underground and returns again and again, as if the river can’t decide whether it belongs above the ground or below it.

But not every river disappears. The Withlacoochee crosses the Cody Scarp too. Instead of vanishing, it becomes a river transformed by springs. Madison Blue Spring pours millions of gallons of groundwater into the river each day, and farther downstream, even more springs join it.

That’s what fascinates me. The Cody Scarp doesn’t make every river behave the same way. It simply changes the rules. Some rivers lose water. Some gain water. Some disappear. Some emerge. All because the limestone beneath them becomes exposed enough for water to move in ways it can’t farther north.

The river that has captured my attention is Little River, which is honestly more creek than river. It’s close to where I grew up. Little River flows quietly through North Florida until it reaches a landscape of sinkholes where the water disappears into the limestone.

What happens after that isn’t entirely understood. Researchers believe some of the water may return at Little River Spring, about ten miles away. Other research shows that water entering the Little River and nearby Stick Sink system contributes to the groundwater feeding Troy Spring, on the opposite side of the Suwannee River.

Think about that for a moment. A river disappears into the ground. Its water travels through limestone beneath forests, farms, roads, and even beneath the Suwannee River itself before returning to the surface.

Years ago, when looking for a home to build Anasa,  I nearly bought land just south of Little River Sink. The property had two sinkholes (or karst windows) where you could look directly into the underground water below.

What caught my attention was where they were. On a map, they appeared almost perfectly aligned between Little River Sink and Little River Spring. I have no idea whether they were actually connected. Maybe it was coincidence. Maybe it wasn’t. But standing beside those openings, it was impossible not to wonder what was happening beneath my feet.

That’s one of the things I love most about North Florida. The landscape doesn’t tell all of its stories on the surface. Sometimes they’re hidden beneath the limestone. Sometimes they’re carried underground by rivers that disappear. Sometimes they’re revealed again where a spring quietly returns them to daylight. You just have to pay attention.

Because the North Florida we see is only half the story. Beneath it is another landscape entirely. One where rivers don’t always follow the blue lines we draw on maps.

— Dion

P.S. Have you ever visited River Sink, Dead River Sink, Madison Blue, Little River, or Troy Spring? I’d love to hear which North Florida places have surprised you the most.

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The Railroads That Disappeared

I grew up around the remains of railroads I never really knew were there.

When I was a child, an old steam locomotive sat beside the Luraville Country Store. I knew it had been pulled from the Suwannee River. I knew it was old. But I don’t think I understood just how old it was, or what it represented.

The locomotive was already an antique when it arrived in Suwannee County. Historians believe it was built sometime between 1850 and 1855, making it one of the oldest surviving steam locomotives in the country. It may have pulled passenger cars during its early years, before being sold to the Bache Brothers Lumber Company around 1890 and put to work hauling logs through the forests of North Florida.

Around 1900, its working life ended in the Suwannee River. No one knows for certain exactly how it happened. One story says the locomotive jumped the tracks at a curve and fell into the river. According to local accounts, the locomotive was being moved across the Suwannee by barge to reach timberland in Lafayette County. As it was lowered down the bluff on a temporary track, the restraining lines broke. The locomotive rolled across the barge and disappeared into the river.

It stayed there for 81 years. During periods of low water, people could see parts of the locomotive beneath the surface of the river. It became part of the local landscape and part of the stories people told.

In 1976, a group tried to recover it. They removed the bell, whistle, throttle, and other pieces, but they couldn’t bring up the locomotive.

Somewhere in this history is a story my uncle Larry once told me. Uncle Larry said he had been involved in an attempt to pull the locomotive from the Suwannee with a wrecker. As I remember him telling it, they weren’t successful. I haven’t been able to determine exactly when his attempt took place or whether it was part of one of the documented recovery efforts. But I remember the story.

And on January 19, 1979, James “Buddy” Lancaster finally brought the locomotive back to the surface. Lancaster had grown up seeing the locomotive in the river during periods of low water and dreamed of recovering it.

After 81 years underwater, the old engine was pulled across the river bottom and brought ashore on the Suwannee County side.

Lancaster brought it home to Luraville and displayed it beside the Luraville Country Store, which his family owned and operated.

That’s where I remember seeing it. I was a child then.

I knew the locomotive had come from the river. But I didn’t understand that the rusting engine beside the road had been built before the Civil War, may once have carried passengers, later hauled logs through the forests of North Florida, and spent more years underwater than most people live.

Eventually, the locomotive was sold to Jack Goyke of Jacksonville Crane Company, who donated it to the State of Florida in 1982. It was restored and moved to Tallahassee, where it remains today.

But the locomotive isn’t the only reminder of the railroads that once crossed this part of Florida. Not far from my river property, another one is still standing in the Suwannee. It’s called Drew Bridge.

Today, the bridge is one of the strangest things you’ll see along this stretch of river. On one side, a dirt road comes relatively close. On the other side, there is almost nothing but forest. No highway. No town. No obvious reason for a bridge to be standing there at all.

But more than a century ago, trains crossed the Suwannee here. According to local histories, the swing bridge was purchased in Brazil around 1899, transported to the Suwannee River, and placed into service around the beginning of the twentieth century.

It became part of the Suwannee & San Pedro Railroad, a line that ran from Live Oak through Mayo and eventually toward Perry. The railroad wasn’t simply carrying passengers between towns. It was part of a much larger network built to reach the forests.

Across Florida, logging companies pushed railroads deeper into timber country. The trains carried workers, equipment, and logs. Communities grew along the tracks. Some of those logging railroads eventually helped lay the foundation for larger commercial lines.

At Drew Bridge, the railroad created its own path through the forest. Tracks approached the river. Trains crossed the swing bridge. The railroad continued through what is now thick woods.

Then the railroad disappeared. The tracks were removed. The forest grew back.

Around 1920, Suwannee and Lafayette counties purchased the abandoned bridge with hopes of converting it into a road crossing. That never happened. The roads never came. And the bridge stayed.

I’ve known about the locomotive and Drew Bridge for most of my life. I saw the locomotive beside the Luraville Country Store. My uncle told me about trying to pull it from the river. I’ve passed the old bridge many times by kayak.

But for most of my life, they were separate curiosities. An old locomotive. An abandoned bridge. Stories people told. Only recently have I begun to understand that they are remnants of something much larger.

There was once an extensive network of railroads crossing this part of Florida. Some carried passengers and freight between towns. Others were built deep into the forests to carry away the longleaf pine and cypress that fueled the growth of North Florida.

The locomotives disappeared. The tracks were pulled up. The mills closed. The forest grew back. And within only a few generations, much of that railroad world became almost invisible.

That’s one of the things I find most interesting about North Florida. The landscape doesn’t always tell you what happened there. Sometimes you have to look for what’s left behind.

A locomotive pulled from the bottom of a river. A bridge standing in the middle of the Suwannee. A faint railroad grade disappearing into the forest.

Pieces of a world that once connected towns, carried timber, moved people, and helped shape this part of Florida. The railroad is gone. But if you know where to look, you can still find the tracks it left behind.

— Dion