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Photo Diary: Silver Springs State Park, FL [1]

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Date: 2023-03-23

Silver Springs, near Ocala FL, served as the filming location for everything from silent films to the Creature From the Black Lagoon to James Bond. But it is most famous for its glass-bottom tourist boats.

For those who don't know, I live in a converted campervan and travel around the country, posting photo diaries of places that I visit. I am currently wintering in Florida.

Originally, this area of Florida was inhabited by the Timucua, whose domain stretched from southern Georgia down along central and eastern Florida to around Cape Canaveral. Timucuan artifacts found at the Springs show that they regularly visited this area for many thousands of years.

After Florida became a US territory in 1821, the area around Ocala became an agricultural center, with orange groves and tobacco fields. The rivers, including the Silver River which ran to the St Johns River and on to the Atlantic at Jacksonville, became important transportation routes.

But the Silver River was of particular interest because its source was a large pool of fresh water that flowed from a number of springs. Geologically, this part of Florida consists of limestone layers that were laid down at the bottom of an ancient seabed. Today, the underground aquifer lies close to the surface, and the area contains a large number of springs and artesian wells.

By the early 1870s, the Silver Springs had become an attraction for visitors and tourists from up north. Local residents Hullam Jones and Phillip Morrell set thick panes of glass into their small paddle-wheel tourist boats which allowed the visitors to look down into the water. It became a hit with the tourists, and Silver Springs became one of the largest attractions in Florida. In 1924 the site was purchased and expanded by W.M Davidson and Carl Ray. Gasoline-powered canopied tourist boats appeared. Some of them still run today.

In 1929, reptile enthusiast and showman Ross Allen, a transplanted Pennsylvanian with a flair for publicity, opened the Ross Allen Reptile Institute nearby, which did daily snake and alligator shows and which also became a successful tourist locale. Allen’s reptile farm would remain open until Walt Disney World appeared and killed off most of the old Florida attractions. Allen died in 1981.

Meanwhile, Florida had been discovered by Hollywood. The state’s tropical scenery made it a favored place for filming “jungle movies”, and the exceptionally clear water at Silver Springs made it perfect for shooting underwater scenes. The first film to be shot here was “Seven Swans”, a silent film made in 1916. This led to a long string of movies and TV shows being shot here, beginning with the classic “Tarzan” starring Johnny Weissmuller in 1932. In the 1930s and 1940s, five more Tarzan movies were filmed here. In the 1950s, the classic monster movies “Creature From the Black Lagoon” and its two sequels were shot here, and the underwater scenes for the TV series “Sea Hunt”, starring Lloyd Bridges, were also filmed in the Springs. In the 1960s, the TV show “I, Spy” shot an underwater episode here (and left behind some prop statues for the tourists), and the climactic underwater frogman fight in the 1965 James Bond movie “Thunderball” was filmed here. Parts of “Moonraker” and “Never Say Never Again” were also shot at the Springs.

The movie makers were also blamed for another relic they left behind, but this one wasn’t actually their fault. The story goes that in 1939, when Hollywood came to Silver Springs to film "Tarzan Finds a Son", the filmmakers packed along some Rhesus Monkeys as background props--which promptly ran off into the trees and escaped. Today their descendants can still be found living in the wooded areas around Ocala.

Alas, that story is a myth. There is indeed a feral colony of Rhesus monkeys in the area, but there were no monkeys of that species used in the filming. Instead, the most likely origin story for the Florida Rhesus troop is that, in 1938, a local promoter who called himself "Colonel" Tooney set up a "jungle boat ride" attraction on the Silver River and imported three pairs of Rhesus Monkeys for the tourists to look at. Within days they had escaped their island and were running free, and while Colonel Tooney was unable to recapture them, he was able to feed them regularly with fruits and monkey chow to keep them near the riverbank where the tourists could see them. Over time, the monkeys did what monkeys do, and the troop got bigger. By the 1980s there were three populations, each with a number of troops. Today there are around 300 Rhesus monkeys living near the original Silver Springs release site, and other troops have moved into the nearby Ocala National Forest and spread as far as Jacksonville and Tampa.

In 1949, Paradise Park opened about a mile away from the present-day boat rides. This resort was for “Colored Only”, and served African-Americans who were, in the segregated South, banned from the Whites-only Silver Springs attractions. The Jim Crow park had glass-bottom boats and jungle cruises of its own, as well as a petting zoo and a lake-front beach. Paradise Park closed in 1969 after the Florida tourist industry was finally desegregated. Shortly later, a new theme park opened nearby called Wild Waters, but it was unable to compete against Disney World and closed not long afterwards.

By the late 1970s, however, the whole area was in decline. The tourist trade dried up as Disney, Sea World and Universal sucked up all the business. The Springs also began to suffer from environmental issues caused by agricultural runoff. In 2013 the State of Florida stepped in, bought the remnants of the tourist boats, and merged the property with the nearby Silver Springs State Park. Today, the classic glass-bottom tourist boats have been refurbished and revamped, and are run by the state as a historical site.

Some photos.

The park

One of the glass-bottom boats

Aboard the boat

There are 30-some freshwater springs feeding the river

Fishies

More fishies

Cypress trees

Bird Island, where the local birdies come to nest

Nesting Cormorants

Nesting Anhingas

The sunken remains of a Timucuan Native dugout canoe

The Blue Hole

A pair of Wood Ducks

A submerged Cypress log. It fell into the spring about 200 years ago.

Prop statues made for an episode of “I, Spy” that was filmed here

Back to the dock

The Discovery Center displays artifacts from the park’s history

Gill Man from Creature From the Black Lagoon, which was filmed here

Some of the native fishes found in the spring

It was pretty crowded when I visited

Yes, there is a troop of feral Rhesus Monkeys living here. Alas, I did not spot any.

A dock used to film the TV show “Sea Hunt”

This old building was part of Paradise Park, a segregated “Colored Only” resort that was once located here

Monument to Osceola

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/story/2023/3/23/2156949/-Photo-Diary-Silver-Springs-State-Park-FL

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