Lake Carlton, Tavares: One of Only Two Harris Chain Lakes That Can Be Drained

Carlton is small enough — 378 acres on most maps, 388 on others — that you could spend a weekend on the Harris Chain and never set a prop in it. Of the eight lakes on the chain, only two can be dewatered and refilled without throwing the whole hydrologic system out of balance: Griffin, at 16,500 acres, and Carlton. Griffin's turn came in 1984. For Carlton, the Florida Game and Fresh Water Fish Commission proposed the same treatment, and a USGS hydrologic study was done to evaluate what draining it would take.

The proposal was to drain the lake and leave it down long enough that the muck on the bottom — decades of accumulated organic sediment, the dark soft layer that feeds algae blooms and starves rooted plants — dried out and compacted, then let it refill. The same reasoning drove the 1987 scrape at Lake Tohopekaliga.

Carlton's position put it on the short list. The Harris Chain — Beauclair, Dora, Eustis, Harris, Little Harris, Yale, Griffin, Carlton — is stitched together by canals and by the Apopka–Beauclair lock that controls flow down from Lake Apopka to the north. Drop the level on most of those lakes and the change runs through the rest of the system. Carlton sits on the western side of the network, in a spot where its level can be lowered without moving the other seven. Combine that with its acreage and you get the one small Harris lake that can be experimented on.

The lock also carried Lake Apopka's water for decades — once one of Florida's most celebrated bass fisheries, later one of its most notorious pollution cases. Beauclair took that degraded water first, Carlton next, along with the phosphorus load that drove the algae in both. Any work done inside Carlton was going to be partial as long as that inflow stayed the same.

The Lake Apopka North Shore restoration and the Nutrient Reduction Facility — a marsh flow-way system built to strip phosphorus out of Apopka water before it moves downstream — changed what arrives through the lock. A 2024 paleolimnology study in the Journal of Paleolimnology reconstructed Carlton's primary-producer history from sediment cores, measuring shifts in the algae and plants at the base of the food web across the period when Carlton was hydrologically connected to the rest of the chain and the period when human impacts on the system accelerated.

The Master Angler records book lists no entry for the lake. In its discussion, the 2024 study notes that the Florida Department of Environmental Protection has documented noticeable water-quality improvement in both Beauclair and Carlton since the treatment facility went into operation.