WATER & COAST
Wakulla Springs Lodge
Wakulla County · Panhandle & Emerald Coast
The 1937 lodge Edward Ball built above the spring, still taking guests and still looking like 1937.
ABOUT THIS PLACE
Ball was the financier who ran the DuPont interests in Florida, and he built this place to his own taste. The grand lobby has a hand-painted ceiling and beams of heart cypress. A marble and iron staircase climbs past three heavy marble landings. The elevator is Art Deco and is said to be the most historic one of its kind in the South. Twenty-seven guest rooms sit on the second floor, with the original bathtubs and oversized closets still in them. The Edward Ball Dining Room serves southern cooking. The soda fountain counter is marble and is reckoned the longest of its kind anywhere. Two things sit in the lobby that people come in to look at without staying the night: Old Joe, an alligator about eleven feet long who was shot by a poacher and is now in a glass case, and a cast of the head of the Creature from the Black Lagoon, whose underwater scenes were filmed in the spring outside. It joined Historic Hotels of America in 2016
Keep comparing