September 18, 2026
Spring Lake, Brooksville: The Grove That Turned Into an Attraction
A hard freeze wiped out a Spring Lake citrus grower's living in the early 1960s, and rather than replant, the Boyett family turned the survivors into a roadside attraction that outlived the groves around it
A hard freeze in the early 1960s did to the Boyett family what freezes had always done to Florida citrus growers on the Brooksville Ridge — it killed the trees that paid the bills. What the Boyetts did next is the part worth knowing. Instead of clearing the dead wood and replanting, they took what survived and opened it to the public. Boyett's Citrus went from a working grove to a roadside attraction, and it did it because a cold snap had already made the old business impossible.
That decision fits the ground it was made on. Spring Lake sits on the high country of the Brooksville Ridge, some of the most fertile land in Hernando County, and citrus was the reason people wanted it. The rolling terrain and the well-drained soil that make the ridge good grove land are the same features that expose it to cold air on the hardest nights. A grower here was always one freeze away from starting over.
The families who first claimed this land got it under the federal Armed Occupation Act, the mid-1800s program that handed out grants of fertile ground to settlers willing to hold it. The names that came in on those grants — Hope, Howell, Lykes, Lee, Rogers — are still stamped across Brooksville today, on roads and landmarks and in every account of the county's early history. Spring Lake was where several of Hernando County's oldest families put down.
Before any of them arrived, the land carried older uses. Off Spring Lake Highway, deep in the orange groves and reached by a side road, sits a cemetery that holds the remains of Civil War veterans. The ground under it was an Indian settlement first, then the Townsend family homestead, then a school, then a church — layers of occupation stacked on the same acreage, now quiet among the citrus rows.
The community itself was once part of Fort Dade, a name that also covered present-day Dade City to the south. The fort's own history explains why people settled where they did. There was no well water at the original fort site — the limestone underneath wouldn't give it up — so the post moved to where freshwater springs came out of the ground, and that spot became Brooksville. Water dictated where the town went. On the ridge above it, the springs and the drainage decided where the groves went.
Citrus ran the local economy long enough that when the Boyetts' trees froze, converting a grove to an attraction was a reasonable business move rather than a novelty. A grower who couldn't sell fruit could still sell the experience of the grove — the rows, the trees, the fruit still on the branches. Boyett's Citrus made that trade in the early 1960s and became a fixture people drove out to see.
The freeze cycle that forced the Boyetts' hand kept working on the ridge for decades. The groves thinned. What replaced them was houses — Spring Lake Forest, Spring Lake Village, five-acre lots off Spring Lake Highway where a man could buy peace and quiet in 2003 and expect to keep it. The subdivisions carry the lake's name the way the old roads carry the settler families' names.
The cemetery is still out there in the groves that remain, holding the Civil War dead among the orange trees, on land that has been a village, a homestead, a school, and a church.
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