See a ghost 'fairyland' forest reemerge in Florida
Sixty years ago, these freshwater springs and forests were drowned by a 9,500-acre reservoir. Could the ecosystem finally be restored?
On New Year’s morning, Captain Erika Ritter wakes before dawn in the cabin on Florida’s Ocklawaha River her grandfather built in 1937 out of pine logs and cypress timber from the nearby swamp. She operates river tours aboard her pontoon boat, “The Anhinga Spirit,” and has to prepare for back-to-back charters.
Ritter’s passengers usually opt for trips upriver to see what’s left of the wild Ocklawaha, a spring-fed stretch that winds through canopy forests with sidelong palm trees and sleeping alligators. But ever since fall, she’s been busy showing them a part of Florida hidden for the past sixty years: The miles of river drowned in 1968 for a federal project called the Cross Florida Barge Canal.
Every five years or so, Florida’s state Department of Environmental Protection draws down the 9,500-acre Rodman Reservoir that flooded the Ocklawaha. The drawdown breaks up matted aquatic plants to improve navigation. In October, dam-keepers opened the metal gates to begin releasing impounded water into the northward flowing St. Johns River.
As the water dropped, a ghost forest began to emerge: First the jagged tips of bald cypress and swamp tupelo that had hung on the longest, and then their hollowed trunks. By winter, thousands of petrified trees, snapped off at 10 to 12 feet, stood like bleached bones in the dark reservoir. Once a hardwood swamp with oaks and elms, red maples and palms, now totems to a drowned past.
Along the historic river channel, two of the estimated 20 freshwater springs lost to the reservoir began to bubble to the surface from the ancient aquifer below. Tobacco Patch Springs came to life as a turquoise shaft of light in a brown patch of mud. Cannon Springs emerged on its forested bank like a blue-crystalline lens, offering a view of what a restored Ocklawaha might one day look like.
That day may be closer than any time since 1971, when President Richard Nixon stopped the barge canal, saying it would endanger wildlife and “destroy this region of unusual and unique natural beauty.”
Sale Extended - Save up to $20!
Florida Senator Jason Brodeur thinks this year’s legislative session, which begins today in Tallahassee, could finally bring the river back. Brodeur and fellow Republican Rep. Wyman Duggan, who chair the Senate and House environmental appropriations committees, have filed bills to create the Northeast Florida Rivers, Springs, and Community Investment Act. The act would restore the Ocklawaha as part of a larger economic and recreation plan for communities like Ritter’s that surround the flooded river—but never saw the prosperity promised by the barge canal.
“Previous efforts were ‘dynamite the dam,’ and that’s not what this is at all,” Brodeur says. “This is a much more thoughtful, long-term, comprehensive glidepath to restoration.”
And this time, the effort coincides with a rare glimpse of what lies drowned beneath Rodman Reservoir.
A “weird, wondrous, magical” river
The Ocklawaha rises from lakes in central Florida and winds north for 74 miles. It traverses the Ocala National Forest and connecting with the spring-fed Silver River before curving east to join the state’s largest river, the St. Johns, near the city of Palatka.
The river is one of the oldest continuously flowing in Florida, older than the St. Johns. Paleoindians likely spent time on its banks at least 12,000 years ago. The riverbed turns up their flint spear points and other stone tools, along with the elongated tusks and teeth of mastodons, mammoths, and saber-tooth tigers. The region’s hundreds of artesian springs, including one of the world’s largest at nearby Silver Springs, became hubs of sustenance and culture for early Floridians.
Its swampy remoteness kept the region sparsely settled. But the Ocklawaha became famed in early American steamboat tourism, its forest so thick that passengers had to duck canopied branches and Spanish moss as they chugged through the Florida wilds to spy alligators and plume birds. “A sail into fairy-land,” the 19th century writer and abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe called it. “A spectacle weird, wondrous, magical,” she wrote, “to be remembered as one of the things of a lifetime.”
At night, boat crews burned resin-rich pine knots to illuminate the animals in the woods and waters. Mary Todd Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant made the trip. The poet Sidney Lanier devoted a chapter in his 1876 book Florida to the Ocklawaha, calling it “the sweetest water lane in the world.”
But Florida boosters were already dreaming of cutting a ship channel across the state to rival New York’s Erie Canal, linking the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico. The Army Corps of Engineers repeatedly rejected it as costly and unnecessary, write the historians Steven Noll and David Tegeder in their book on the Cross Florida Barge Canal, Ditch of Dreams. Yet the need for jobs during the Great Depression trumped economics. Construction began in the 1930s as part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal.
Midcentury opponents thought they’d finally killed a boondoggle. “Pure blubber in the pork barrel,” U.S. Senator William Proxmire of Wisconsin once called it. But on a rainy day in 1964, some 15,000 people crowded a rural ranch south of Palatka to watch President Lyndon B. Johnson blast ceremonial dynamite and launch the Ocklawaha section of the canal.
Just a few years later in 1971, with political winds blowing strong for the environment, President Nixon halted the project. But by that time, the Army Corps had already built a 7,200-foot-long dam across the Ocklawaha and drowned 16 miles of winding river, along with the 20 springs and the cypress and hardwood swamps.
The reservoir that submerged them is roughly the size of all Walt Disney World’s developed theme parks and resorts. It has since become a themed attraction itself: a bass-fishing lake with its own political constituency. So even though the barge canal was stopped, the river has never been freed–despite decades of bipartisan efforts to restore it.
“It’s one of those iconic bass fisheries, since its inception, that has attracted bass anglers from literally all over the country,” says Gene Gilliland, National Conservation Director of the Bass Anglers Sportsman Society. “It’s not just a Florida thing.”
Restoring a wildlife corridor
Ritter, 67, was a child when the Army Corps flooded the river. As construction rumbled toward her family’s land in the small community of Eureka in the mid-1960s, her mom convinced the crew to back off, saving part of the old riverbank. Her dad was for the dam, thinking it would kill the mosquitos and bring higher-end businesses than the small fish camps dotting the riverside.
But the mosquitoes remained and the businesses failed to materialize. The fish camps and other mom and pop outfits were taken by eminent domain. Today, the area is a modest crossroads with gas and a Dollar General Market.
Ritter’s family settled the area in the 19th century. She flips through an old album of black and white snapshots, smiling family members holding up largemouth bass, catfish and bream in the era before the dam. She’s tired of the assumption that locals and fishers are for saving the reservoir. “Saying the fishing community wants Rodman saved really dishonors all the people who fish and care about all species,” Ritter says. “It’s people specifically wanting a trophy largemouth bass that want Rodman left.”
A science and economics report commissioned by the Pew Charitable Trusts found that the reservoir and tail waters below the dam support both recreational and subsistence fishing. The bass and black crappie fisheries in Rodman require intense management, including the drawdowns and extensive herbicide spraying. If the 9,500-acre pool turns back into river, their numbers would inevitably shrink. But both species would live in a restored Ocklawaha, along with a new abundance of other sought-after fishes such as striped bass, catfish, and sunfish.
A high density of fishes congregate immediately below the dam, according to a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service report on restoration, “supporting the notion that certain species are attempting to move upstream, potentially for spawning, but are unable to pass.”
Marjorie Harris Carr, the scientist and Florida Defenders of the Environment cofounder who led the effort to stop the barge canal, once described the Ocklawaha River Valley as “a safe highway and sanctuary for wildlife over an enormous area,” and that turned out to be spot on. The restoration would rejuvenate three rivers over 12 counties from Central Florida to the Atlantic Ocean beyond Jacksonville. It would remove a significant barrier to animal migration pathways in the Florida Wildlife Corridor, along with giving manatees access to a habitat they sorely need.
While special protections at the lock allow some of the slow-moving animals to pass, others have died trying and “it is not an acceptable manatee conveyance,” according to the FWS comments submitted by Gian Basili, a deputy state supervisor for the agency in Florida.
Manatees historically relied on natural springs and thermal river basins to shelter from cold temperatures. In the 20th century, dams and other infrastructure across Florida pushed them to winter at power plants and other industrial complexes. But in recent years, they’ve died in record numbers, many due to starvation because of mass sea grasses losses on the coasts.
At the same time, they’re losing access to industrial water as power plants are decommissioned and modernized. Between the warm-water springs and abundant vegetation in the Ocklawaha and Silver rivers, and the opportunity to move freely through to the St. Johns, “removing the dam and creating a free-flowing river would greatly aid the future of manatees in Florida,” Basili wrote.
A new approach to river restoration
The Rivers, Springs and Community Investment Act represents a new approach to restoring the Ocklawaha in that it allocates as much funding for communities surrounding the reservoir and river as to the bass and the manatees. Including more locals has been a long time coming, says Linda Myers, a former county commissioner and tax collector in Putnam County and now president of the Great Florida Riverway Trust, a nonprofit formed by outdoor recreation and other businesses to support restoration. “I am so excited that the Legislature is seeing the economic connection,” Myers says.
Brodeur, the Senate sponsor, estimates the project will cost about $75 million over the next several years, including grant programs to let communities shape their part of the restored river with projects like boat ramps, piers and springs access.
Back at her pontoon boat, Ritter imagines restoration would boost her business like it has during drawdown: Birders, kayakers, sketchbook-toting artists, nature photographers, springs-hunters and curious locals have all booked tours to check out the ghost forest and the lost springs.
Come March, they’ll be covered back up by the dark waters of the reservoir, maybe for the last time.
