Suwannee River State Park in Madison County, Florida

Photograph: Withlacoochee - Suwanee - panoramio.jpg by jesseasmith · CC BY-SA 3.0 · Cropped to the 1200x750 attraction-card frame and converted to WebP by 1stFlorida.com. Opened and checked against the place before installation.

Madison County attraction

Suwannee River State Park

Madison County · North Florida & First Coast

The park at the mouth of the Withlacoochee, where that river joins the Suwannee near the old town of Ellaville.

ABOUT THIS PLACE

Two settlements stood on this ground and neither survives. Columbus was founded in 1841 and lived on riverboat traffic; its cemetery, begun in 1860, still holds twenty-three graves under stones of several different materials. Ellaville was a sawmill town built by George Drew, later governor of Florida, and it cut timber that went out by river and rail. In 1863 Confederate soldiers threw up earthworks at Columbus to protect the railroad bridge, and those mounds are still there, reached by a short trail to an overlook above the confluence. Old sawmill machinery lies about, and a stretch of the stagecoach road that ran from Pensacola to Jacksonville crosses the property. Balanced Rock, a limestone column twenty feet high, stood for millions of years and fell into the river in 2015. The state bought the first land in 1936 and opened the park in 1951. More than fifteen miles of trail run along both banks

GETTING THERE

Get Directions ↗Official place website ↗

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