Suwannee Springs in Suwannee County, Florida

Photograph: FlSuwanneeBlueSprings.jpg by State of Florida, photo by T. Roberts · Public domain · 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 Springs

Suwannee County · North Florida & First Coast

A sulfur spring on the bank of the Suwannee River near Live Oak, and the ruin of the resort that grew up around it.

ABOUT THIS PLACE

The spring sits inside a limestone wall built in the late 1890s, fifteen feet high and three feet thick, which still stands and still holds the water. This is a second-magnitude spring, moving about 23.4 cubic feet a second, and the water runs between seventy and seventy-six degrees all year. It comes out of Oligocene limestone hard and smelling of sulfur. Francis J. Ross bought the land in 1831 and built the first resort. After the Second Seminole War people came for the water, believing it healed them. Levi Scoville and Jesse Culpepper put up a five-turreted wooden hotel with 125 rooms in 1884, and it burned within months. The replacement went up in 1885 and caught fire around November 1901. A third hotel burned in 1925 and that was the end of it. What is left is the wall, the foundations and the steps down to the river. The Suwannee River Water Management District holds the 1,800-acre tract now and keeps it open for swimming, walking and paddling. There is no fee and no gate. At least six springs sit on the property, five of them flowing into the river

GETTING THERE

Get Directions ↗Official place website ↗

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