Camp Helen State Park in Bay County, Florida

Photograph: PC Beach Camp Helen SP04.jpg by Ebyabe · CC BY-SA 3.0 · Restored from the credited Wikimedia Commons file, normalized to the consistent attraction-card frame and converted to WebP by 1stFlorida.com. Portrait originals retain their complete composition over a softly blurred extension of the same photograph.

Bay County attraction

Camp Helen State Park

Bay County · Panhandle & Emerald Coast

A 180-acre park where Lake Powell meets the Gulf, holding a 1940s company vacation camp that the state kept rather than cleared.

ABOUT THIS PLACE

The park sits at the western end of Bay County at 23937 Panama City Beach Parkway, with water on three sides and Gulf beachfront at the front of it. Lake Powell is one of the largest coastal dune lakes in Florida, a formation that occurs in only a handful of places worldwide, where a freshwater lake sits behind the dune line and breaks through to the Gulf now and then. People have used this ground a long time. The Deptford culture was here around 500 years before the common era, and later groups left pottery. An Inlet Beach Hotel went up in the 1920s and burned down by 1931. Margaret Hicks and her daughter then ran the property as Loch Lomond, part home and part vacation place, through the Depression. Avondale Mills, an Alabama textile company, bought it in 1945 as a holiday camp for its workers and opened it in 1946, adding duplexes, a recreation hall and a fishing pier in the 1950s. It closed in 1987. Florida bought the land in 1996 and opened the park in 1997. The lodge and the Rainbow Cottages are restored and standing

GETTING THERE

Get Directions ↗Official place website ↗

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