PARKS & OUTDOORS
Jonathan Dickinson State Park
Martin County · Atlantic Coast
Around eleven thousand acres between Hobe Sound and Tequesta, on the Loxahatchee River.
ABOUT THIS PLACE
It is named for a Quaker merchant whose ship went down on this coast in 1696, leaving him, his family and the others to walk north to St. Augustine. In 1942 the Army built Camp Murphy on this ground, a secret radar training school with more than a thousand buildings and over six thousand men in it; the school closed in November 1944 and the land became a state park in 1950. Some of the old camp roads are now the Camp Murphy mountain bike trails. The Loxahatchee was made a National Wild and Scenic River in 1985, the first in Florida, and the boat tour up it goes to the homestead of Vincent Natulkiewicz, known as Trapper Nelson, the Wildman of the Loxahatchee, who turned his camp into a roadside attraction and died here in 1968. An observation tower stands on Hobe Mountain above the scrub. Sand pine scrub, flatwoods, mangrove and swamp all meet in the park, and Florida scrub-jays live in the dry ground
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