Ocala National Forest: Roosevelt's Gift and the New Deal's Masterpiece
Near Ocala, Florida
In nineteen oh eight, President Theodore Roosevelt signed into existence a national forest on a stretch of scrub and hammock east of Ocala. It was the first national forest established east of the Mississippi River, and to this day it remains the southernmost national forest in the continental United States.
The Ocala National Forest was created to protect something specific: the world's largest contiguous sand pine scrub. Sand pine scrub is one of Florida's rarest ecosystems, an ancient remnant of coastal dunes from a time when sea levels were far higher and peninsular Florida was a chain of sandy islands. Its species, the Florida scrub jay, the sand skink, the gopher tortoise, evolved in isolation over millions of years and exist nowhere else in the same combination.
At the time of its creation, much of the land was already logged and degraded. The goal was recovery. And recovery happened slowly, then dramatically, thanks to the Civilian Conservation Corps.
In the nineteen thirties, Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal sent thousands of young men to work in federal lands. At the Ocala National Forest, these workers built campgrounds, trails, cabins, swimming areas, and recreation facilities from scratch. The jewel of their work is Juniper Springs Recreation Area, which the Forest Service has called the finest example of Civilian Conservation Corps recreation construction in the eastern United States. The mill house the Corps built at Juniper Springs, with its native coquina stonework, is still standing and still in use.
The forest today covers more than three hundred eighty thousand acres. It contains three first-magnitude springs, including Alexander Springs and Silver Glen, which push millions of gallons of clear water daily into canoe-friendly rivers. The Florida Black Bear, nearly extinct statewide by the nineteen seventies, has recovered here and now roams the forest in numbers large enough to occasionally wander into Ocala neighborhoods.
Roosevelt could not have known any of that would unfold. He signed a document. Generations of stewardship made a forest.
