The St. Johns River: One of the Few That Flows North

There is a geographical fact about the St. Johns River that surprises most people when they first hear it. The river flows north.

Not metaphorically, not temporarily, not in some peculiar backwater. The St. Johns River originates in a chain of marshy lakes in the center of the Florida peninsula and travels northward for about three hundred ten miles to empty into the Atlantic Ocean near Jacksonville.

It is one of only a handful of major rivers in the United States that run in that direction, and one of about sixty rivers in the entire world that do so. The reason is topography. Central Florida is extraordinarily flat, and the grade from the headwaters to the ocean is so gradual, dropping only about thirty feet over its entire length, that the river is barely moving at any given point.

Tidal influence pushes salt water more than a hundred miles upstream from the mouth, which means that much of the river behaves less like a traditional river and more like an enormous, very slowly draining estuary. This quality made the St. Johns simultaneously a highway and a mystery to early European explorers, who found it difficult to tell which direction its current was actually flowing.

It also shaped Jacksonville's geography in fundamental ways. The downtown sits on a bend in the river where the current is slow enough that a natural harbor formed, and it was that harbor that determined where the settlement would go. Today the river is a working waterway, a major port, a recreational corridor, and a fragile ecosystem under pressure from development and pollution.

The Jacksonville skyline reflected in water that is draining northward into the Atlantic is one of the more quietly unusual views in American geography.