Hillsborough River State Park: The CCC and Florida's Oldest Park
Near Tampa Bay, Florida
During the worst years of the Great Depression, the federal government sent young men into the wilderness to build things. In Florida, a Civilian Conservation Corps crew came to a river bend in Hillsborough County where the Hillsborough River tumbled over limestone shelves in what passes for rapids in a state famous for its flatness. What they built here became one of Florida's original eight state parks.
Land acquisition began in nineteen thirty-four, and the CCC went to work almost immediately. For four years, the crews built: suspension bridges, picnic shelters, administrative offices, a fence line that still partially stands. The park opened in nineteen thirty-eight, and some of those original structures are still in use, an unusual survival record for Depression-era infrastructure.
The Hillsborough River has flowed through this landscape for approximately twenty-seven thousand years. People have lived along its banks for twelve thousand to fifteen thousand years, drawn by the same thing that draws visitors today: fresh water, shade, game, and in this particular stretch, the unusual rapids where the river drops over ancient limestone. The geology is part of what makes this place significant. Most of Florida sits on a flat limestone shelf; the exposed outcrops here give the river an energy it lacks almost everywhere else in the state.
The park also contains Fort Foster State Historic Site, the reconstructed Second Seminole War post just upstream. So in a single visit a traveler can walk from a twelve-thousand-year-old occupation landscape to an eighteen-thirties military fortification to a nineteen-thirties New Deal construction project. Not many parks compress that range of human history into a few hundred acres.
The suspension bridge the CCC built is still the way most visitors enter the forest trails. It sways a little over the river, the same river that drew people here when this was still one of the most remote corners of the Florida peninsula.
