St. Johns River

The St. Johns is the longest river entirely within Florida, about 310 miles from the marshes west of Vero Beach to the Atlantic at Jacksonville, and it flows north for almost all of that distance. It is also one of the laziest rivers in the country. Its source lies less than 30 feet above sea level, so the whole river falls about an inch per mile, and at Palatka it moves so slowly and runs so wide that it looks more like a long lake than a river. Because it drops so little, the ocean reaches deep inside it. Tides regularly reach Lake George, about 106 miles upstream. The river also collects salt from ancient seawater trapped in the aquifer, which rises through springs along its middle stretch. Before railroads, the St. Johns was Florida's highway. Steamboats carried tourists south from Jacksonville after the Civil War, and Palatka became a winter resort with grand hotels and a busy port for timber and citrus. Upstream, the naturalist William Bartram paddled much of the river in the 1770s and described it in his Travels. In 1998 the St. Johns was named one of fourteen American Heritage Rivers. Manatees move up and down it, and its middle reaches are fed by some of the largest springs in the state.