Suwannee River in Gilchrist County, Florida

Photograph: Fanning Springs FL hist park04.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.

Gilchrist County attraction

Suwannee River

Gilchrist County · North Florida & First Coast

The river that forms the whole western boundary of Gilchrist County, running dark and slow out of the Okefenokee Swamp.

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. It forms the western edge of Gilchrist County, and every spring park in the county sits either on it or on the Santa Fe that feeds into it. It is a blackwater river, stained tea-brown by tannins out of the swamp, and where springs enter it the contrast between clear and dark water is sharp enough to see from the bank. In places it drops through limestone in small rapids, which is unusual for Florida. People lived along it for thousands of years; Timucua speakers held both banks in the sixteenth century, and Spanish missions stood along it by 1633. Steamboats worked the river before the Civil 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 where the name itself came from is still argued and nothing is settled. The Suwannee alligator snapping turtle, described by scientists only in 2014, lives in this river system and nowhere else

GETTING THERE

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