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 killed the Boyett family's citrus trees on the Brooksville Ridge, the trees that paid the bills. Instead of clearing the dead wood and replanting, the Boyetts took what survived and opened it to the public. Boyett's Citrus went from a working grove to a roadside attraction, and became a fixture people drove out to see.
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 make the ridge good grove land, and they leave it exposed to cold air on the hardest nights.
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. Hope, Howell, Lykes, Lee, Rogers — the names that came in on those grants 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.
The community itself was once part of Fort Dade, a name that also covered present-day Dade City to the south. There was no well water at the original fort site, where limestone lies underneath, so the post moved to where freshwater springs came out of the ground, and that spot became Brooksville.
Citrus ran the local economy on the ridge for decades after the Boyetts made their trade, and the freeze cycle kept working on it. The groves thinned. What replaced them was houses, in subdivisions that carry the lake's name — Spring Lake Forest, Spring Lake Village — and five-acre lots off Spring Lake Highway that were selling in 2003.
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