Ponce de Leon, Florida

The small Holmes County town of Ponce de Leon sits above a set of springs that produce fourteen million gallons of crystal-clear water every day at a constant sixty-eight degrees year round. The area was settled by around eighteen thirty and the Second Seminole War later disrupted the settlement. Local boosters named the place Ponce de Leon Springs and promoted it as a Fountain of Youth to attract tourists, leaning on the legend of the Spanish explorer.

A resort hotel was built here and a state park eventually followed, preserving the springs that gave the town its borrowed name. Long before the boosters arrived, the Chatot and Chisca peoples lived beside these springs. The spring run flows about three hundred fifty feet, and the water is about twenty feet deep at the head.

A log hotel went up in eighteen forty. In September of eighteen sixty-four, about seven hundred Union soldiers under General Alexander Asboth paused at the springs on their way to the Battle of Marianna, destroyed the hotel, and looted nearby homes. The state acquired the park on September fourth, nineteen seventy.

You can still swim in the spring, and the park protects four rare species of pitcher plants and more than forty acres of old turpentine woodlands. The town itself was incorporated in nineteen sixty-three and counted five hundred four residents in twenty twenty.