Peace River

ABOUT THIS PLACE

The Peace River rises near Bartow in Polk County and runs 76 miles southwest to Charlotte Harbor, and its drainage basin takes in nearly all of Hardee County. Sixteenth-century Spanish maps called it Rio de la Paz. The Creek and Seminole name was Talakchopcohatchee, the river of long peas, which English speakers turned into Peas Creek and then Pease Creek. Through Hardee it is slow, tea-colored and easy to paddle, running past Zolfo Springs and Wauchula with oaks and cypress along the banks. The stretch from Zolfo Springs down to Gardner, about 19.5 miles, is the usual overnight run, camped on the sandbars. What brings people from further away is what lies in the gravel. The river cuts through Miocene, Pliocene and Pleistocene deposits, and shark teeth, ray plates, turtle shell, dugong and whale bone, horse teeth and mastodon and mammoth fragments all collect in the same beds. Shark and ray teeth can be kept without a permit; other vertebrate fossils from state land need a Florida fossil permit. October through April is when the water is low enough to work the bars