Florida’s maximum stage is off the crushed route in Walton County
PAXTON — A journey to Britton Hill, the highest all-natural place in Florida, moved just one the latest customer to poetry.
“Get missing to get observed, Florida’s highest very little floor, cows & crickets the only seem, the silence now so loud, time to pavement pound,” an not known author wrote Jan. 2 in the visitor’s log at Lakewood Park, which stands atop Britton Hill at the north close of Walton County.
Britton Hill, at 345 toes higher than sea amount, is in the unincorporated Lakewood neighborhood, just northeast of Paxton and much less than five miles south of the Alabama condition line.
A lot more:Video clip from Britton Hill
Florida’s best place is selected by a monument and symptoms in the Walton County-owned Lakewood Park at 2756 N. County Road 285, as well as by directional indications, such as just one at the CR 285-County Road 147 intersection.
From the tiny park’s clover-lined floor or its driveway, people can take pleasure in a pastoral perspective of environmentally friendly farmland dotted with dozens of black cattle.
Upcoming yr, county officials may possibly begin selling the obscure landmark of Britton Hill as an off-the-overwhelmed-route gem.
‘Midget Mountain’
Britton Hill/Lakewood Park is positioned 28 miles northeast of Crestview and 23 miles northwest of DeFuniak Springs. On an Apple iphone Maps application, the hill is robotically deemed a “mountain.”
A faded brochure posted on the park’s kiosk lists the high place of each individual state. According to the brochure provided by the Highpointers Club of Northfield, Minnesota, Britton Hill is the cheapest point out highpoint in the United States.
The 2nd-cheapest, at 448 ft earlier mentioned sea amount, is Ebright Azimuth in Delaware. Alaska’s Denali (aka Mount McKinley), at 20,320 feet, is the highest highpoint.
“It was back again in 1900 when William “Will” Henry Britton, a timber baron from North Carolina, purchased the Lake Lumber Co. in Florala, Alabama,” states a Northwest Florida Day by day News article from Nov. 18, 1991 that is posted in the Lakewood Park kiosk. “Will moved the mill company 3 miles east. He named the internet site Lakewood. And in 1904, his brother, Thomas Jones Britton … and several other companions established the Britton Lumber Co.”
According to the short article, the flooring of New York’s Grand Central Station and Waldorf Astoria Resort and the New Orleans’ Courthouse are built out of rift-sawn longleaf yellow pine from Lakewood.
The as soon as-flourishing lumber town also is acknowledged as getting the birthplace of William De Kova “Bill” White, a former Key League Baseball All-Star player and broadcaster who in 1989 turned the initial Black president of MLB’s Countrywide League.
In addition, Jacqueline Cochran, “the internationally acclaimed female aviator and founder of her have fragrance firm, whose labels incorporate Nina Ricci and Pierre Cardin, expended element of her childhood in Lakewood,” in accordance to the 1991 short article.
In 1982, an Affiliated Push report called Britton Hill a “Midget Mountain” that attracted visitors with mountain-climbing gear. In 1984, the condition Legislature approved a matching grant for Walton County to build the park and monument to mark Florida’s highest point.
Bragging rights
While Walton County’s “Lakewood” isn’t talked about, the Florida map in Rand McNally’s 2021 Road Atlas does involve “Britton Hill, 345 ft., Highest Pt. in Florida.”
Most likely not astonishingly, “We do not receive lots of (or any) calls about Britton Hill at the South Walton Visitor Details Center,” said David Demarest, spokesman for the Walton County Vacationer Growth Council.
Britton Hill “hasn’t truly been in our wheelhouse,” he reported, for the reason that until eventually March of this calendar year there was only one exclusive taxing district for the county’s tourist development tax (TDT) and it only integrated South Walton. That meant the tax was only collected in South Walton, and for that reason could only be legally utilized to advertise/make improvements to South Walton, Demarest said.
Last 12 months, nonetheless, voters in North Walton voted to enact a vacationer improvement tax for the spot north of Choctawhatchee Bay as perfectly. Individuals collections started in March of this year, he said.
“After collections have been manufactured for a yr, all those cash may perhaps then be spent to promote and make improvements to those people areas north of the bay, and I would hope that energy to incorporate marketing for Britton Hill, top to a lot more phone calls for info,” Demarest stated. “We’re presently ramping up our belongings and expertise base in preparing for that greater scope of marketing, and I expect that Britton Hill will be a wonderful brag place for Walton County and an appealing PR pitch.”
Extra:Walton County TDC will get go-forward for new customer center
Demarest explained it is vital to observe that cash elevated in every single of the particular taxing districts continue to ought to be made use of to advertise all those particular locations, even although both are inside of Walton County.
“Still, I’m guaranteed there will be some possibilities for synergy,” he explained.
Besides taking a selfie at Florida’s best level, people to Lakewood Park atop Britton Hill can delight in two picnic pavilions, a person of which has a grill. The park also has restrooms and characteristics three mountaineering trails, every of which is less than a mile very long.
“Maybe some day I will shift to Florida?” a visitor from Pittsburgh not too long ago wrote in the park’s visitor’s log. “I am retired and having aged. It is very chilly in the winter season in Pa. and do not like it no additional.”