FORT BROOKE.
This is within two miles of *Orange Spring, a sulphur spring, with strongly impregnated waters, but at present without accommodations for travelers. It is to be hoped that this will not continue, as it is one of the most admirable of the many medicinal springs of Florida.
Twelve miles above is
PAINE’S LANDING,
near where the waters of Orange Lake drain into the river.
One and a half miles beyond is a settlement with the pretty name Iola. A few miles further up “forty foot Bluff” commences, which skirts the river several miles, here and there separated from it by cypress groves.
As the steamer ascends, the banks become higher, pines more frequent along the shore, and cultivated fields more numerous.
At length, at a distance of 100 miles from the mouth of the river, the crystal current of *Silver Spring Run, here as large as the river itself above the junction, pours into the coffee-colored waters of the Oklawaha. The Run is ten miles in length, with extensive savannas on either side, shut in by a distant wall of pines. In the spring months these savannas are covered with thousands of beautiful and fragrant flowers.[B] The stream is rapid, with an average width of 100 feet, and a depth of twenty feet. The water is perfectly clear, so that the bottom is distinctly visible. At places, it is clothed with dark green sedge, swaying to and fro in the current; at others, ridges of grey sand and white shells offer a pleasant contrast.
[B] A good description of Silver Spring is found in Gen. McCall’s Letters from the Frontier, p. 149, and a more scientific one in my Notes on the Floridian Peninsula. Appendix I.
The Spring-head forms an oval basin, 150 yards long, 100 feet wide, and forty feet deep. The water gushes from a large opening about 5 feet high, and fifteen feet long, under a ledge of limestone at the north-eastern extremity. It is free from any unpleasant taste, has a temperature of 73 degrees Fah., and is so transparent that a small coin can be distinctly seen on the bottom of the deepest part of the basin. When the basin is seen with the sunbeams falling upon it at a certain angle their refraction gives the sides and bottom the appearance of being elevated and tinged with the hues of the rainbow.