WATER & COAST
Suwannee River
Dixie County · North Florida & First Coast
A blackwater river of 246 miles running out of the Okefenokee Swamp to the Gulf, forming the whole eastern edge of Dixie County.
ABOUT THIS PLACE
The Suwannee rises in the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge near Fargo, Georgia, and runs about 246 miles southwest through south Georgia and north Florida to the Gulf at the town of Suwannee. It is a blackwater river: tea-colored from the tannins it carries out of the swamp, cold and clear where springs feed into it. In places it drops through limestone in small rapids, which is unusual in Florida. People have lived along it for thousands of years. Timucua speakers held both banks in the sixteenth century, Spanish missions stood along it by 1633, and Black Seminoles lived near the river in the years before the Civil War. Steamboats worked it before that war, and in the late 1800s the sulfur springs at White Springs drew enough visitors to support fourteen hotels. Stephen Foster's song of 1851 made the name known worldwide, though the origin of the name itself is still argued over and no explanation is settled. The Suwannee alligator snapping turtle, described by scientists only in 2014, lives nowhere else. The Lower Suwannee National Wildlife Refuge was created specifically to keep the water quality of this river high, which tells you what the river is worth to the counties along it
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