“This wonderful spring is located in the Park opposite the Clarendon Hotel. The water boils up from a large fissure, some twenty feet below the surface, at the rate, it is said, of three thousand gallons per minute. It is as clear as a diamond, and the effect is most beautiful at noonday, when the sun shines directly into the spring, and objects can be seen at the bottom tinted with the prismatic hues. The swimming pools are only a few feet from the basin of the spring, and the water flows through them in an immense volume, but so quietly as hardly to be observed. The tourist will find nothing in Florida more delightful than a bath in this water. Ladies who enjoy bathing should not forget to take their bathing suits with them, as “swimming in the pools” is a great sport at Green Cove, and those who cannot swim may easily learn under the tuition of Miss Smith, the obliging Managress of the Spring. It is said that you can enjoy these swimming baths every day in the Winter. Certainly it has seemed odd enough to me, just after reading a letter from home telling of a severe snowstorm, to go and take my bath, with the accompanying chorus of mockingbirds in the surrounding trees.”

-excerpt from a tourist brochure, Where to Go in Florida by Daniel F. Tyler, 1880