Category: Springs

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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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Maybe she was paying attention all along

A few days ago, I was walking into a doctor’s appointment when my phone buzzed.

It was my daughter, Kendall. She’s in her first semester at FSU (Go Noles!) and she wanted to share something she workshopped in class.

I’ll admit it, I found myself wiping away tears in the hallway. Not because it was my daughter who wrote it, although I’m certainly a proud dad. But because every now and then someone puts words to something you’ve carried in your heart for a long time, and that’s exactly what she did.

As parents, we spend years hoping we’ve passed along something worthwhile. Kindness. Curiosity. A love of people and places. The ability to notice things others walk past.

Reading her poem, I realized something.

Maybe she was paying attention all along.

She gave me permission to share it, and I’m grateful she did. I hope it resonates with you the way it did with me.

Springs on the Suwannee

by Kendall Sweat

Somewhere

I sit among the bald cypresses and swamp gums

with my feet dipped in the cold, clear water,

anchoring me to the moment,

allowing me to stretch my own roots into the soil.

The water bugs dance past me

gliding like figure skaters across the surface,

whispering to me stay afloat

and trust the unseen.

The sun places a blanket over my soul,

encouraging me to curl up

among the bald cypresses and swamp gums

and let my body rest.

I melt into the land that I lie on:

my limbs become the trees,

my blood transforms to water,

my soul joins the dancing water bugs.

I am distant from civilization,

distant from the screaming cars

and the imposing skyscrapers;

the gray, dead concrete.

Somewhere

I sit among the bald cypresses and swamp gums

and their roots reach out to mine,

announcing where I belong.

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The Forgotten Resort on the Suwannee

There was a time when people traveled from all over the country to visit Suwannee Springs. Today, most people drive right past it without realizing it’s there.

The springs sit beneath a canopy of oaks along the Suwannee River, tucked away at the end of a quiet road. If you visit today, you’ll find the remains of stone spring walls, a few scattered ruins, and the river flowing much as it always has.

The spring itself is a sulfur spring. You’ll notice the smell almost immediately. It’s not unpleasant once you know what it is, but it’s certainly distinctive. More than a century ago, that mineral-rich water was the attraction. People believed the spring’s waters could help heal a variety of ailments, and they traveled hundreds of miles by train to experience them.

It’s hard to imagine now, but this was once one of Florida’s earliest tourist destinations. Over the years, grand resort hotels were built here to serve visitors who came seeking the mineral waters flowing from the springs. One after another, those resorts were destroyed by fire, leaving behind little evidence of what once stood here. The grounds are quiet. The river moves slowly past the springs. The oaks cast shade over ruins that many people never notice.

For most of my life, I didn’t think much about any of that. To me, Suwannee Springs was a place to swim. My favorite place to jump was from the far spring wall. To get there, I would walk along the top of the old spring structure, all the way around to the opposite wall. The jump felt a little higher there. The water felt a little deeper. Whether it actually was or not didn’t matter much. To me, it was the best place to jump.

I spent years visiting the springs without giving much thought to the people who came before me. Now when I stand there, I find myself looking at those same walls differently.

The wall I once jumped from was built during a time when visitors traveled hundreds of miles to experience these springs. And it’s strange to think that a place many Floridians have never heard of was once known well beyond North Florida.

I’ve always been fascinated by places like that. Not because of what they are today, but because of what they used to be. You can stand beside the spring walls and try to picture the people who once gathered there. Families arriving after long journeys. Visitors hoping the spring waters would improve their health. Guests walking the grounds of hotels that no longer exist. A bustling destination where today there is mostly quiet. What I find most interesting is how little remains.

Many of Florida’s historic attractions were replaced, redeveloped, or built over.

Suwannee Springs feels different. Nature has slowly reclaimed much of it. The river still flows past the springs. The oaks still shade the grounds. And if you look closely, you can still find traces of the people who believed this place was worth traveling hundreds of miles by train to see.

That’s one of the things I love about North Florida. It holds onto its stories. Not always in museums or history books. Sometimes they’re tucked away beside a river, waiting for someone curious enough to stop and look.

— Dion

P.S. Have you ever visited Suwannee Springs? I’d love to hear what you remember about it.

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I Thought There Would Be Resorts Here

Luraville Country Store
Luraville Country Store

As a kid, I was convinced this road would someday be lined with resorts.

If you’ve ever been to the springs along the Suwannee River, you might know the turn I’m talking about. You leave Highway 51 at the flashing light by the Luraville Country Store and turn left.

Even then, it felt like you were going somewhere special. I just assumed everyone else would eventually figure it out too. I imagined traffic. Hotels. Restaurants. Souvenir shops. Surely the rest of the world would discover what we already knew.

Instead, that road has barely changed in my lifetime. It’s still one of the quietest roads I know. And I’m glad.

The first spring along that road for me was Telford Spring.

I spent so many summer days there with my dad that I almost think of it as my home spring. It’s not the biggest spring in Florida. It never has been. But it has always felt special.

There’s a small spring basin, crystal-clear water, and a short cave you can swim through. Growing up, it was mostly a local spot. The kind of place where you recognized the other cars parked nearby.

At one point it was closed off and could only be reached by boat. Today it’s once again open to the public thanks to the water management district, and people still love it.

When I think about Telford, I don’t just remember the spring itself. I remember sitting beneath an old oak tree with my boom box propped against the trunk, 80s music playing while I swam in water so cold it almost hurt when you first jumped in. Those memories feel as clear as the water.

A little farther down the road is Peacock Spring.

Long before it became a state park, it was simply a dirt road disappearing into the woods. It still feels that way.

Peacock has a primordial quality to it. Even now, it feels more like a discovery than a destination. You won’t usually find crowds there. Instead, you’re likely to meet people who have traveled from around the world to dive one of the most remarkable underwater cave systems on earth.

One of my favorite memories is riding on the back of my dad’s green MGB convertible with my sister while he flew down that old bumpy dirt road. To us, it felt like a roller coaster.

Even today, Peacock can feel like it’s yours alone. Sometimes the only sign that anyone else is there, besides a few cars in the parking lot, is a stream of bubbles rising from deep below the surface, evidence of cave divers exploring the darkness beneath your feet.

Inside the park is Orange Grove Sink.

Most days, the surface is covered in duckweed, tiny flowering plants that create what looks like a solid green carpet across the water. But if divers are below, their bubbles often clear patches in the surface, revealing the clear water underneath.

One side of the sink is bordered by a towering limestone cliff. As teenagers, after hot days working in the tobacco fields, my friends and I would gather there and leap from the rocks, trying flips and tricks that seemed like a great idea at the time. I’m not sure I’d recommend all of our decisions. But I’d relive those summers in a heartbeat.

When I was young, I thought this road would become famous. I thought resorts would appear. I thought crowds would follow. Instead, it stayed mostly the same.

And maybe that’s the reason these places still feel so special.

— Dion

PS. The summer is a great time to visit North Florida.