Silver Springs: America's First Tourist Attraction
Near Ocala, Florida
There is a place a few miles east of downtown Ocala where the earth exhales. Silver Springs pushes five hundred fifty million gallons of water to the surface every single day through a limestone vent at the bottom of a crystal-clear pool. The water temperature is a constant seventy-two degrees year-round. The clarity is so extreme that you can see individual fish, individual rocks, individual sand grains from the surface thirty feet above.
People have been coming to look at it for a very long time. Samuel Howse purchased the land around the spring headwaters in the eighteen sixties and began showing visitors around. In the late eighteen seventies, a local man named Hullam Jones built the first glass-bottom boat, a flat-bottomed wooden craft with a glass panel set into its hull, so that passengers sitting inside could peer directly down into the spring run below. It was a genuinely novel invention. There was nowhere else on earth with water this clear and tourism infrastructure this developed.
Former President Ulysses Grant visited in eighteen eighty. Steamboats brought visitors up the Ocklawaha River from the Saint Johns. By the nineteen twenties, Silver Springs was drawing hundreds of thousands of visitors annually, and the glass-bottom boat fleet had grown to large gasoline-powered vessels. In nineteen fifty alone, more than eight hundred thousand people came.
Hollywood discovered the springs early. The transparent water made underwater filming possible at a time when it was nearly impossible anywhere else. At least twenty feature films were made here, including six Tarzan pictures with Johnny Weissmuller in the nineteen thirties and forties, the underwater sequences of Creature from the Black Lagoon in nineteen fifty-four, and scenes from the James Bond film Thunderball in nineteen sixty-five.
The state of Florida took over management in twenty thirteen, folding Silver Springs into a state park. The glass-bottom boat tours still run, the same basic technology Hullam Jones invented over a century ago.
