Last Updated: August 2, 2026
White Springs grew up around a sulphur spring, and the spring has a longer history than the town. The Suwannee River here was the boundary between the territory of the Timucua to the east and the Apalachee to the west, and the spring on its bank was regarded as sacred healing ground — neutral territory where even nations at war observed a truce in order to bathe in it. Spanish explorers recorded the custom. Later the Americans built on it: Bryant Sheffield put up a hotel and a spring house in 1836, a multi-storey bathhouse followed, and White Springs became, by most accounts, Florida’s first tourist attraction. The town was a refuge during the Civil War. The spring eventually stopped flowing — by around 1990 it was finished — and the surrounding country never developed the way the rest of Florida did. What is left is the river, and the quiet.
