Kingsley Lake in Bradford County, Florida

Photograph: Orange sunset reflection - Florida, 2017.jpg by Rob Bixby · CC BY 2.0 · 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.

Bradford County attraction

Kingsley Lake

Bradford County · North Florida & First Coast

A near-circle of water two miles across, six miles east of Starke, that pilots named the Silver Dollar Lake.

ABOUT THIS PLACE

Kingsley Lake sits on high ground about six miles east of Starke, on the Bradford and Clay county line, roughly halfway between Jacksonville and Gainesville. It covers about 2,000 acres and is very nearly round, two miles across, which is why pilots flying over it called it the Silver Dollar Lake. The shape comes from how it formed: the lake fills a sinkhole where limestone dissolved beneath it. The sandy edge slopes gently out and then drops away into a central basin 82 feet deep, with an average around 40. The water is unusually clear for Florida, low in nutrients and with little algae in it. Two things own the shoreline. Camp Blanding, the 73,000-acre training base for the Florida National Guard, holds nearly half; during the Second World War it trained more than 800,000 soldiers and was briefly the fourth largest city in the state. The rest is private houses, roughly 180 private docks. Strickland's Landing, a 20-acre beach with water slides that ran from 1946 to 2002 and drew families from every town around, was sold after Woodrow Strickland died. There is no public beach and no public boat ramp. Kingsley Lake Park has a playground, and the Camp Blanding Museum is open to visitors

GETTING THERE

Get Directions ↗Official place website ↗

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