Blue Spring State Park

Early accounts and settlement

While Britain held East Florida (1763–1784), the spring lay at the southern end of Beresford Plantation. The 20,000-acre (8,100 ha) grant to the Earl of Tyrone ran south from Lake Beresford to Blue Spring Landing, which a survey of the river made around 1774 marks as "Mineral Spring". The estate's agent, Charles Bernard, began developing it in the late 1760s, with its dwellings and most of its fields on the east shore of Lake Beresford. According to the park's management plan, part of the estate's indigo and sugarcane lay on what is now the park's northern Starke Tract. In 1782 the Loyalist refugee William Moss bought 1,200 acres (490 ha) of the estate together with nearby Hontoon Island. He abandoned them two years later, when Britain ceded East Florida to Spain and its settlers were evacuated.

The naturalists John and William Bartram both visited the spring. William Bartram reached the plantation in 1774, shortly after a hurricane had wrecked most of its buildings and crops, and was taken from there to see the spring. In his Travels (1791) he described a circular basin large enough for several small boats, from which a run deep enough for a sloop flowed 300 to 400 yards (270 to 370 m) to the river. He reported clear water crowded with fish, alligators and gar, a "brassy and vitriolic" taste, a sulfurous smell, and an orange grove of magnolias, oaks and palms around the basin. He also noted that fish moved into such springs in winter.

In 1803 Spain granted 1,000 acres (400 ha) that took in the spring and the upper half of its run to Francis P. Fatio Jr., who never lived there. Captain John W. Starke bought Fatio's grant in 1851 and planted a citrus grove, which stayed in production until 1985.

Thursby House

Louis P. Thursby, a native of Brooklyn who had served in the Mexican–American War and joined the California Gold Rush, arrived at Blue Spring in 1856. He bought 133 acres (54 ha) from Samuel Parson, the first white settler there, and moved his family into Parson's log cabin. The family owned the lower half of the spring run, and Starke owned the spring and the upper half. Thursby was imprisoned by Union forces during the Civil War. Accounts differ on whether he was held as a suspected Confederate sympathizer or because he owned four or five slaves.

By 1868 Thursby was running a steamboat landing on the river, and Blue Spring became a regular mail stop with his wife Mary as postmistress. In 1872 he built a two-story frame house on top of the shell midden at the mouth of the run, presumably because it was the nearest high ground safe from floods. Northern investors platted the land to the east in the 1870s, and Blue Spring Landing became the arrival point for many of the settlers who founded Orange City in 1875. Nine steamboats eventually called there on regular routes, carrying freight, mail, tourists and sportsmen.

Railroads, bottled water and resort

In 1881 a narrow-gauge railroad, the first in the county, was laid from Orange City to the landing. Mules hauled a wooden flatcar of citrus to a pasture on Thursby's land, and the car then rolled downhill to the wharf. The line, built partly of midden shell, was extended to New Smyrna in 1887 as the Blue Spring, Orange City and Atlantic Railroad and became part of the Florida East Coast Railway in 1896. Its paved-over bed is now Magnolia Avenue. The Orange City Mineral Spring Company began bottling water from a well on what is now park land in 1891. The well supplied a succession of bottlers until 2003.

Thursby died in 1890. His son John later added a third story to the house, which was rented as rooms to travelers and sportsmen. From the 1930s the property was marketed for outdoor recreation. After the Thursbys sold it, Homer Smith ran it as a park and fish camp, followed by Gordon Pierson, who added cabins, boat rentals and concessions. In 1969 Pierson sold the land to Keystone Enterprises, which planned a resort with a campground, pool and bathhouses. The development failed, and the land reverted to the Pierson family.

State park

In 1971 the Cousteau television series filmed an episode on manatees, "The Forgotten Mermaids", at Blue Spring. The Florida Park Service credits the film with drawing attention to the spring as a winter refuge and with strongly influencing the state's decision to buy it. On August 14, 1972, the state's Board of Trustees of the Internal Improvement Trust Fund made the first purchase for the park: about 300 acres (120 ha) bought from the Pierson family, together with the spring itself. In November the trustees leased the land for 99 years to the Division of Recreation and Parks, then part of the Department of Natural Resources; the lease runs to 2071. At the time of purchase, swimmers had badly eroded and littered the spring run.

The park grew through later purchases in 1974 and 1978, and in 1988 Volusia County deeded about 870 acres (350 ha) to the state. A deed in the park's title history requires French Avenue and its boat ramp to stay open around the clock and free of charge until the state improves them. If the state charges admission or cuts their hours without making those improvements, the property reverts to the county. The Florida Manatee Sanctuary Act of 1978 gave legal protection to the manatees at Blue Spring and other refuges.

The Thursby House was a residence until 1981. The park service decided to restore it to its 1915 appearance and opened it as a house museum in 1982. It closed in 1989 and reopened in 2003 with interpretive exhibits. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on May 11, 2000, as one of the two oldest buildings standing in Volusia County.

Early excavations

Jeffries Wyman stayed with the Thursbys in 1873–74 and wrote letters to his son from Blue Spring. He found shell heaps on both sides of the mouth of the run. The larger, on the left bank, stretched about 500 feet (150 m) back from the river and rose to 12 to 13 feet (3.7 to 4.0 m) high. It contained human bones broken apart in what he judged a deliberate way, alongside the bones of deer, turtles and alligators, shell chisels, stone arrowpoints and plenty of pottery. Thursby told him the river had carried away more than 30 feet (9.1 m) of the mound in a few years. He also described two other large mounds nearby, the larger about 400 feet (120 m) long and 13 to 14 feet (4.0 to 4.3 m) high toward Lake Beresford. A large shell mound 0.62 miles (1 km) north of the spring, recorded as 8VO41 and named Live Oak Mound by a University of Florida team, is one that Wyman investigated.

Clarence Bloomfield Moore visited in the 1890s. According to the anthropologist John Goggin, Moore dug into the center of Starke's Grove Mound (8VO39), a sand mound in the old citrus grove on the Starke Tract. State archaeologists who revisited it in 1991 could not tell whether it was natural or man-made. A 1997 study of Moore's collections, cited in the Thursby House's NRHP nomination, traced artifacts he collected to the midden beneath the house.

Later surveys

A 2002 survey of 20 acres (8.1 ha) set aside for cabins recorded four more sites. They included two middens, a scatter of stone tools with an Archaic-period projectile point, and the bed of the 1881 railroad. A University of South Florida model completed in 2010 rated about 5.5 percent of the park as highly sensitive for archaeological remains, 26 percent as moderately sensitive and 69 percent as of low sensitivity. Blue Spring Midden B (8VO43) lies under the park's lower day-use area and carries the most foot traffic of any site, but in 2022 it was still noted to be in good condition.

At Live Oak Mound the field school mapped the topography, including 135 pits left by looters in the 1970s, and tested two of them. The results suggest that the mound began as a midden about 6,300 radiocarbon years ago, in the Mount Taylor period before pottery was made in the region. Shell was then deliberately heaped on top of it in the Orange period. Wyman had reported burials from the mound's upper levels, probably from the later St. Johns II period, but the field school found no human remains. Vandalism at the site has stopped since the state acquired it.

A 2002 survey of 20 acres (8.1 ha) set aside for cabins recorded four more sites. They included two middens, a scatter of stone tools with an Archaic-period projectile point, and the bed of the 1881 railroad. A University of South Florida model completed in 2010 rated about 5.5 percent of the park as highly sensitive for archaeological remains, 26 percent as moderately sensitive and 69 percent as of low sensitivity. Blue Spring Midden B (8VO43) lies under the park's lower day-use area and carries the most foot traffic of any site, but in 2022 it was still in good condition.

Flora

Floodplain swamp lines the St. Johns along the park's western edge. Although it was logged decades ago, many bald cypress trees remain. The park's management plan describes the community as cypress-dominated, with tupelo, water hickory, sweetgum, cabbage palm and red maple. Inland, hydric hammock of laurel oak, cabbage palm, live oak, sweetbay and swamp tupelo gives way to upland hardwood forest on the slopes of the Starke Tract. The shell middens form their own small community of about 3.6 acres (1.5 ha). These well-drained, slightly alkaline mounds typically carry live oak, cabbage palm, red cedar and red mulberry.

The scrub on the eastern ridge, maintained by fire and cutting, is managed toward a mix of sand live oak, myrtle oak, Chapman's oak, saw palmetto and rusty staggerbush. It is broken by open patches of bare sand where lichens and small herbs grow. Several imperiled plants grow in the scrub, among them Curtiss's milkweed, Garberia and shell-mound pricklypear. The Okeechobee gourd grows at several places along the river shore, and the giant airplant Tillandsia utriculata grows in oaks overhanging the spring run. In 2022 the invasive Mexican bromeliad weevil was a new threat to these airplants. The spring run itself has little rooted vegetation, partly because wintering manatees eat what grows there.

Coral ardisia is the park's most pervasive invasive plant species. Its extent in the wet hammocks was not known until surveys began in 2009, and treatment has since cleared areas that were close to a solid stand. Along the river, wild taro, paragrass and torpedograss are treated by park staff and state contractors. Altogether, 416 acres (168 ha) were treated between July 2005 and 2022.

Fauna

Bibliography

• Brillante, Karen; Goodwin, Gary V. (April 2000). National Register of Historic Places Registration Form: Thursby, Louis P., House (Report). National Park Service. NRHP Reference No. 00000468.
• Florida Department of Environmental Protection, Division of Recreation and Parks (October 2005). Blue Spring and Hontoon Island State Parks Unit Management Plan (PDF) (Report). State of Florida. Retrieved October 3, 2026.
• Florida Department of Environmental Protection, Division of Recreation and Parks (July 2022). Blue Spring State Park Draft Unit Management Plan (PDF) (Draft submitted to the Acquisition and Restoration Council). State of Florida. Retrieved October 3, 2026.
• Florida State Parks. "History: Blue Spring State Park". Florida Department of Environmental Protection. Retrieved October 3, 2026.
• Sassaman, Kenneth E. (2003). St. Johns Archaeological Field School 2000–2001: Blue Spring and Hontoon Island State Parks (PDF) (Report). Technical Report. Gainesville: Laboratory of Southeastern Archaeology, Department of Anthropology, University of Florida.
• Wyman, Jeffries (1875). Fresh-Water Shell Mounds of the St. John's River, Florida. Memoirs of the Peabody Academy of Science. Salem, Massachusetts: Peabody Academy of Science – via Internet Archive.

Citations