Famous Dr. Kelly made sure beauty of springs was ours
I’ve just missed seeing a whole bunch of wild turkeys, William Jackson tells me on a cool February morning at Kelly Park in Apopka. If you arrive early enough or you’re camping there, you might spot all kinds of wildlife, says Jackson, a ranger at the popular Orange County park.
Orange County Mayor Teresa Jacobs, Commissioner Bryan Nelson and other folks recently dedicated a Florida Historical Marker recognizing Kelly Park as a state treasure — a marker made possible by the efforts of the Apopka Historical Society.
When I visited, the park was so quiet you could hear the water flowing along Rock Springs Run, moving at 26,000 gallons per minute with the cool allure that makes the springs so popular in summer. Then, Kelly Park is so busy that if you arrive after 10 a.m., you may be too late to get in.
But on a crisp February morning, I could imagine how the spot looked to Dr. Howard Kelly more than a century ago.
Without Kelly, all the folks heading to Rock Springs on blazing summer days might be out of luck. In 1927, the illustrious Maryland physician gave about 200 acres of land around Rock Springs to Orange County expressly for a public park.
Kelly was like three donors in one, historian Jim Robison has written: a naturalist who understood the value of the land, a successful physician who had the money to buy it, and a humanitarian who believed in giving it to the public.
Doctor and cowboy
Born in 1858 to a Philadelphia sugar broker and the daughter of an Episcopal clergyman, Kelly received his medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1882, after taking two years off to work as a cowboy, mostly in Colorado.
A deeply religious man who read the Bible in Greek and Hebrew, Kelly was also one of the four founders of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore. He was among the first physicians to see the potential for using radium to treat cancer.
Kelly was also a fervent reformer who frequently locked horns with the irreverent Baltimore columnist H.L Mencken.
He first saw Rock Springs while vacationing in Florida around 1910. “I thought it in every way the most beautiful and interesting of all [the springs] I had ever seen, not only in Florida, but in any other state,” he later wrote. For him, it was an example of God speaking to humanity through his “open book of nature.”
Almost a quarry
Visited by indigenous people long ago and thought to be an ancient burial site, Rock Springs in the 1850s was owned by cotton grower William Delk. After the Civil War, the area was used to harvest turpentine from the pine trees. It also became a popular picnic spot for early Apopkans and other area residents.
When Kelly first saw Rock
Springs about 1910, the land had narrowly escaped a plan to dig out the rocks there and use them to surface roads, according to a history on display at the park.
After Kelly bought 200 acres with the intent of preserving the land, he first tried to give it to the state of Florida, which did not yet have a state parks system. He turned down an offer of more than $200,000 from a group who wanted to subdivide the land into private campsites for hunters and fishermen. Finally, in 1927, he succeeded in donating the land to Orange County, and the Orlando Morning Sentinel hailed his gift a “Perpetual Paradise for the People.”
It’s a gift we shouldn’t take for granted. When I visited, Ranger Jackson noted how important it is for kids to get away from their TVs and other devices and spend time in nature in places such as Kelly Park. “If they don’t see it, maybe it won’t always be here,” he said.
For information about Kelly Park and Orange County’s other parks, visit OrangeCountyParks.net.