Suwannee River in Suwannee County, Florida

Photograph: Fanning Springs FL hist park02.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.

Suwannee County attraction

Suwannee River

Suwannee County · North Florida & First Coast

The river the county is named for runs 246 miles from the Okefenokee Swamp to the Gulf.

ABOUT THIS PLACE

It rises in the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge near Fargo, Georgia, crosses into Florida and forms much of Suwannee County's northern and western boundary before reaching the Gulf at the Lower Suwannee National Wildlife Refuge. It is a blackwater river, stained the color of strong tea by tannins leached out of the swamp, and the color is the first thing a visitor notices. The Withlacoochee joins it at Suwannee River State Park, the Alapaha comes in from the north, and the Santa Fe enters from the east south of Branford. Dozens of springs feed it along the way, which is why the water is clear and cold at the spring mouths and dark again a few yards downstream. Stephen Foster wrote about the river in 1851 without ever having seen it, and that song is the state song of Florida. Before the Civil War the steamboat Madison worked these waters. The Suwannee alligator snapping turtle, described by scientists only in 2014, lives in this basin and nowhere else. County parks at Little River, Royal Springs and Branford put swimmers and boats on the water

GETTING THERE

Get Directions ↗Official place website ↗

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