average age of water at silver glens sprng

I know this because they later invited me to dive there with them and I found out for myself.įrom the very start, nothing was easy. They also found their diving skills to be tested to the limit in what turned out to be a very sporting cave. They eventually documented over 2000 linear feet of cave passages and discovered one of the largest underground rooms in Florida. SCUBA diving is not normally allowed in Silver Glen Springs, but in 1989 two divers from Ocala, Bill Foote and Eric Hutcheson, were asked by the United States Forest Service (USFS) to map the Silver Glen Springs cave, which had never been explored. It’s name comes from sand boils in the floor of the cave. The Exploration of Silver Glen SpringĮric Hutcheson exploring the Boiler room tunnel.

The following report is the best reference I have found regarding the archeological resources of Silver Glen. What a shame that man’s sensibilities are so stunted that these great archeological marvels were seen as nothing more than raw material for roads. Try to imagine what Silver Glen Springs looked like before the mining operations. The two together are said to cover an area of twenty acres.” and the other occupying the right bank of the creek at its mouth, as well as the shore of the lake. There are two distinct portions one forming an amphitheater which surrounds the source or “boil,” …. “has upon its banks the most gigantic deposits of shells met with on the waters of the St. One hundred and one years later, Jeffries Wyman, curator of the Harvard Peabody Museum, made the first description of the archeological deposits. mounted a very high ridge, from whence had an almost endless view of a vast bared desart, (the Big Scrub) although together impenetrable so thickly over grown with short schrubby Oaoks, Bays, Yapon, Prinos & short laurel bushes…” I went a shore, mounted very high, hills (shell mounds) very steep next the Creek, but fell away more gradually back, & enterd a beautifull grove of Palm Trees. “… padled near a mile up & come to a vast Fountain, almost in every respect like the other great Spring that I visited before (Salt Springs). The first recorded descriptions of the springs were made by William Bartram in 1774. Shell from these mounds can still be seen on the road going to the nearby Juniper Club. Other even larger shell mounds on the south side of the run near the lake, over twenty-five feet tall, were quarried away during this same period. Sadly, most of the mound was mined away in the 1930’s and 1940’s for road building material, but small remnants of the once great mound still exist near the spring below the office building. Archeologists have evidence that the spring attracted human settlement at least 10,000 years ago, and artifacts from every cultural period in northeast Florida have been found around the spring.ĭuring the nineteenth century the spring was surrounded by a large shell mound, referred to as the “amphitheater”.

Silver Glen Springs has been popular for a long, long time. Engravings published by Theodor de Bry in Grand Voyages (1591), after watercolors made by Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues, are the earliest known European depictions of Native Americans in what is now known as the United States. State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory. Jacques Le Moyne (1591) Floridians Crossing Over to an Island to take their Pleasure.

Average age of water at silver glens sprng