Category: State Parks

Posted on

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

Posted on

The Name in the Woods

My dad started taking me to Peacock Springs long before it became a state park. Back then, at least in my memory, it felt like little more than a dirt road disappearing into the woods.

That road was part of the adventure. It rolled up and down enough that my sister and I treated it like a roller coaster, sitting on the back of my dad’s MGB while he drove faster over the hills than I would probably recommend today.

At the end of the road was Peacock Springs. I knew the name long before I ever wondered where it came from.

Today, Wes Skiles Peacock Springs State Park still feels surprisingly wild. It is not polished in the way some Florida state parks are. The roads are simple, the woods grow close, and the springs seem tucked into the landscape rather than built around.

There is something almost primordial about it.

And yet, on almost any visit, you are reminded that this quiet patch of North Florida is known far beyond North Florida. Cars in the parking area carry license plates from around the country. Sometimes you hear accents from other parts of the world.

They have come because beneath these woods lies one of the most extensive underwater cave systems in the country. But long before Peacock became a name known among cave divers, it was the name of a family.

Before the Divers Came

Dr. John Calvin Peacock came to this part of Florida from North Carolina in the years before the Civil War and settled near the springs that would eventually carry his family name.

The Peacock family built a life here. They farmed a large tract of land, raising cattle and growing crops, while Dr. Peacock practiced medicine throughout the surrounding countryside.

It is easy today to picture a doctor working from an office or hospital. In rural North Florida in the nineteenth century, the job looked very different. A country doctor might travel for miles by horse or buggy to reach someone who needed him.

The roads would have been rough. The communities were scattered. Much of the landscape between them was still forest.

Somewhere in those woods, the Peacocks built their home and raised their family. And eventually, they buried members of that family there.

The Cemetery

Not far from the springs is the Peacock family cemetery.

For many years, it became overgrown enough that it nearly disappeared back into the woods. Later, the cemetery was restored and marked, preserving one of the clearest physical connections between the family and the landscape that now carries their name. I like that the cemetery is still there.

The springs have become famous for something the Peacock family could never have imagined. Divers now travel thousands of miles to explore passages deep beneath their former land. Maps show miles of underwater cave extending beneath a landscape that, from above, still looks mostly like woods. But the family remains there too.

Their name appears on park signs, maps, cave surveys and dive logs.

Most people who say “Peacock Springs” probably never stop to wonder who Peacock was. For most of my life, I didn’t either.

A Name Can Outlive a Place

That has become one of the things I notice more often as I learn the stories of North Florida. Names survive. A ferry disappears, but Charles Spring remains. A preacher passes through a community, and generations later his name may still be attached to a spring.

A family settles beside a patch of woods in the nineteenth century, and people from around the world eventually travel there carrying dive tanks beneath a sign bearing their name.

The places change. The reasons people come to them change.

But sometimes the name stays.

I wonder what Dr. Peacock would think if he could stand near the spring today and watch divers preparing to disappear beneath the water.

He probably would not recognize much of what they were doing. But he would recognize the woods. And he would certainly recognize the name.

Experience It

One of the best ways to experience Peacock Springs is to walk the interpretive trail that follows the cave system beneath the ground.

From the surface, it looks like a walk through ordinary North Florida woods. But beneath your feet are miles of flooded passages twisting through the limestone. The trail helps connect the landscape you can see with the one you cannot. That changes the way you walk through the place.

The woods stop feeling like empty space between the springs. You begin to understand that there is another landscape directly below you, hidden beneath the roots and soil.

While you are there, look for the plaque honoring Sheck Exley, one of the pioneers of modern cave diving.

That plaque has a different meaning for me because Sheck was once one of my high school math teachers. At the time, I knew him as an eccentric and interesting teacher who liked to say, “It’s my way or the highway.” I knew he was involved in karate. I did not fully understand that he was also helping explore and map the underwater world beneath places like this.

That is a story for another Field Note. For now, walk the trail slowly.

Think about the Peacock family who lived here before the park existed. Think about the divers who later came to understand what was hidden below. Then look around at the same woods that have been here through all of it.

The Peacock family gave this place its name. Generations later, people like Sheck Exley helped us understand what was hiding beneath it.

And once you know both stories are there, the woods feel a little different.

— Dion, Anasa founder

Posted on

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