Wekiwa Springs State Park

This guide to Wekiwa Springs State Park in Orlando goes back to the 1890s, when Northern tourists arrived by train believing this spring's cold, clear water could cure rheumatism and tuberculosis, and to the hotel and bathhouse built beside it under its original name, Clay Springs. It traces the spring's renaming to Wekiwa in 1906 and its decades under a hunting and fishing club before Florida bought the land in 1969. Alligators and black bears still share these woods with the swimming hole today.