Suwannee River

The Suwannee River rises in the Okefenokee Swamp in southern Georgia and runs about 246 miles to the Gulf of Mexico. At White Springs it cuts between limestone banks, its water stained dark as strong tea by the tannins of the swamp and the pine forests it drains. It is one of the least developed large rivers in the Southeast, without a single dam along its main stem. Its fame comes from a songwriter who never saw it. Stephen Foster wrote Old Folks at Home in 1851 and needed a two-syllable Southern river for the opening line. His brother found the Suwannee in an atlas, and Foster shortened it to Swanee. He never visited Florida. The song became one of the most popular in American history, and in 1935 Florida made it the state song, later revising lyrics that had been written in minstrel dialect. White Springs grew up around a sulfur spring on the riverbank that drew visitors seeking cures through the 1800s, and at its height it was one of Florida's first tourist resorts. The Stephen Foster Folk Culture Center State Park now sits on the river's bank in the town, with a 97-bell carillon tower built to ring out Foster's songs. Downstream the river is fed by hundreds of springs across its basin, and it carries so much groundwater that in dry seasons it runs clearer than in wet ones.