De Leon Springs: Sugar, Seminoles, and a Fountain of Youth That Never Was

At De Leon Springs in Volusia County, Florida, a freshwater spring pumps about twenty million gallons of water daily at a constant seventy-two degrees , the same temperature summer and winter. The Mayaca people lived along this spring for thousands of years before Spanish contact, and their midden mounds remain in the surrounding state park.

The Spanish built some kind of mill or works here as early as fifteen seventy, though the record is thin. What is documented is the eighteen thirty-two sugar mill, the first water-powered sugar mill in Florida, whose brick foundations and iron machinery survive behind the spring's current restaurant. The mill powered a full plantation operation; up to one hundred enslaved workers grew and processed sugar and cotton here, and the enterprise was prosperous until the Second Seminole War changed everything.

In eighteen thirty-five, Seminole warriors attacked and burned the plantation, driving away the enslaved workers and cattle in a raid that fit into the broader Seminole resistance to removal. General Zachary Taylor eventually drove the Seminoles from the area, and the mill was rebuilt in eighteen forty-nine. Union soldiers destroyed it again in April eighteen sixty-four during Birney's Raid, when they learned the plantation owner was supplying the Confederate Army.

By the late eighteen hundreds, the plantation site had been reborn as a tourist destination. Promoters renamed it Ponce de Leon Springs and invented the story that the explorer had found his Fountain of Youth here , a claim with no historical support but considerable commercial appeal. Tourists came by steamboat, then by rail, charmed by the story and the remarkable water.

The mill building was reconstructed in the early nineteen hundreds and became the Old Spanish Sugar Mill restaurant in nineteen sixty-one, where visitors today still cook pancakes on griddles built over the spring.