Suwannee River in Hamilton County, Florida

Photograph: Along the Suwannee - panoramio (1).jpg by Mike Tilley · CC BY 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.

Hamilton County attraction

Suwannee River

Hamilton County · North Florida & First Coast

The river that wraps around three sides of Hamilton County, and the one Stephen Foster made famous without ever seeing it.

ABOUT THIS PLACE

The Suwannee rises in the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge near Fargo, Georgia, and runs about 246 miles southwest to the Gulf. It crosses into Florida at the northern edge of Hamilton County and then curves around the county's north, west and south sides, with the Withlacoochee and the Alapaha joining it along the way, so Hamilton is very nearly an island. This is blackwater country: the river runs tea-brown with tannins out of the swamp, and springs enter it clear and cold. In places it drops through limestone shelves in small rapids, which is rare in Florida and is why Big Shoals is here. People lived along it for thousands of years, with Timucua speakers on both banks in the sixteenth century and Spanish missions standing by 1633. Steamboats worked it before the Civil War, and the sulfur springs at White Springs drew enough visitors in the late 1800s to support fourteen hotels. Stephen Foster's song of 1851 carried the name around the world, although the origin of the name itself is still argued over. The Suwannee alligator snapping turtle, described by scientists only in 2014, lives in this river and nowhere else

GETTING THERE

Get Directions ↗Official place website ↗

MOVING TO HAMILTON COUNTY?Fourteen services. One business each.

Attorneys, movers, insurance, title companies, roofers and nine more — one listed business per service in Hamilton County.

See local help in Hamilton County →

Keep comparing

Return to the Things to Do choices in Hamilton County.

Back to Hamilton County