The Florida Park Service is the Florida state government agency that manages the Florida State Parks system. It is the state parks component of the Division of Recreation and Parks, a division of the Florida Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) that also contains the Office of Greenways and Trails; the two names are widely used interchangeably. The division administers roughly 176 state parks and trails covering nearly . Annual attendance regularly exceeds 25 million visitors, and the division has estimated the direct economic impact of the system at more than $3 billion annually.
The service was formally established in 1935 under the Florida Board of Forestry, following the arrival of the federal Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), whose members built the first seven state parks over the next seven years. Under Jim Crow laws, the parks were racially segregated from their inception until the mid-1960s. African American members of the CCC built many of the original parks in segregated units but were largely prevented from visiting them until Little Talbot Island State Park opened a separate segregated area in 1952. An independent Board of Parks and Historic Memorials administered the agency from 1949 to 1969; subsequently, it was integrated into the Department of Natural Resources (DNR) as the Division of Recreation and Parks. In 1993, the DNR merged with the Department of Environmental Regulation to form the Department of Environmental Protection, placing the division under its oversight.
Under the leadership of Ney C. Landrum (1970–1989), the number of parks in the system nearly doubled, and the agency adopted a unit classification system in 1972 that now sorts its holdings into 17 categories. Modern land acquisition has been largely funded through voter-approved bond programs, beginning with Governor Reubin Askew's environmental package in 1972 and continuing through the Conservation and Recreation Lands (CARL) Trust Fund (1979), Preservation 2000 (1990), and Florida Forever (1999). Fran Mainella, who led the division from 1990 to 2001, was subsequently nominated by President George W. Bush to head the National Park Service (NPS), becoming the first woman to hold that position. Volunteers contribute over a million hours annually across the system, coordinated by park-level citizen support organizations and the statewide Florida State Parks Foundation.
Florida is the first state park system to have received the National Recreation and Park Association's National Gold Medal Award four times, in 1999, 2005, 2013, and 2019. The agency has been the subject of periodic controversy over commercial and recreational development inside state parks, most notably a 2011 proposal to build golf courses at four parks and the 2024 "Great Outdoors Initiative," both of which were withdrawn after bipartisan opposition. The second episode led to the 2025 State Park Preservation Act, which prohibits golf courses, other sporting facilities, and new lodging in state parks.
History Early preservation efforts
Florida's involvement in the preservation of public sites for recreation and commemoration precedes the creation of any formal park agency. The state legislature created the Olustee Battle Memorial in 1909 to mark the site of the Battle of Olustee. The 1921 legislature funded four further preservation projects, all of which eventually became state historic sites: monuments at the Natural Bridge and Marianna battlefields, both carried out by chapters of the United Daughters of the Confederacy; a monument at St. Joseph Bay marking the site of the 1838–39 constitutional convention; and the purchase of an tract at the site of the Dade battle, to be developed by a temporary Dade Memorial Commission. In 1925 the legislature accepted the donation of the Gamble Mansion in Manatee County, which a United Daughters of the Confederacy chapter had bought to save it from foreclosure, and appropriated $10,000 to restore it. These sites were looked after by the legislature and by private organizations rather than by any park agency until 1949, when they were transferred to the new Florida Board of Parks and Historic Memorials.
Separate preservation efforts began in 1915, when the Florida Federation of Women's Clubs, led by May Mann Jennings, persuaded the legislature to transfer of state land on Paradise Key in the Everglades to the federation for park purposes; the transfer was matched by a comparable donation from the estate of Henry Flagler. The federation formally dedicated Royal Palm State Park on November 23, 1916, with a motorcade of 168 cars carrying more than 1,000 guests. Although never operated by the state, Royal Palm functioned as Florida's first state park in all but name until 1947, when it was turned over to the United States federal government to become part of Everglades National Park.
The first attempt at a statewide park system came in 1925, when the legislature enacted a law drafted by the Jacksonville attorney S. Bryan Jennings, the son of May Mann Jennings. It created a "Florida State Park System" to be owned and operated by the Trustees of the Internal Improvement Fund, and authorized the Trustees to acquire land for public recreation or for the preservation of natural beauty or historic association. A provision allowing the Trustees to sell state land to pay for the new parks was struck before passage, and the Trustees never acted on the law; a field agent of the National Conference on State Parks who surveyed the state in 1925 and 1926 counted five existing "state parks": Royal Palm, Olustee, Natural Bridge, the Dade memorial, and the Constitution Convention memorial. The system existed only on paper for another decade.
By the 1930s, public interest in state parks had become apparent. Highlands Hammock, a tract of virgin subtropical forest near Sebring, was assembled by the Roebling family of New Jersey; working with the local Tropical Florida Parks Association, they opened the land to the public in 1933. The following year, it was accepted by the state, becoming Florida's first state park upon the Park Service's formal creation in 1935.
The CCC era The federal Civilian Conservation Corps, created in 1933 as part of the New Deal, provided the labor and capital that helped establish the Florida state park system. State officials, led by Governor David Sholtz, moved to obtain federal camps and to identify suitable landholdings for their work. In 1935 the legislature enacted Chapter 17025, formally creating the Florida Park Service under the Board of Forestry, authorizing it to "establish, develop and maintain a system of state parks" and appropriating $25,000 annually for the purpose. Most of the land the state committed to those parks was federal grant land that remained uncommitted, or property that had reverted to the state through tax forfeiture during the collapse of the 1920s land boom.
Charles H. Schaeffer served as the first director of the Florida Park Service from 1935 to 1937, followed by former state procurement officer Henry J. Malsberger from 1937 to 1940. By the end of 1935 the agency had established the seven original state parks: Gold Head Branch, Hillsborough River, Myakka River, Florida Caverns, Fort Clinch, Torreya, and Highlands Hammock. According to Nelson, the system's first employee was a Highlands Hammock CCC enrollee named Pantzer, who from May 1935 worked as a visitor guide there on weekday afternoons and on Sundays. At these parks, CCC workers under National Park Service supervision built the roads, cabins, bathhouses, picnic shelters, and other visitor infrastructure that allowed the state to open them to the public over the following seven years. At Royal Palm, work was carried out by CCC Company 262, Camp SP-1, based in Homestead beginning in October 1933 under the supervision of landscape architect William Lyman Phillips of the Olmsted Brothers firm. Historian David J. Nelson has argued that the CCC era built the tourism image of modern Florida as it is today.
In 1941 the legislature renamed the Board of Forestry the Florida Board of Forestry and Parks and dropped the requirement that the National Park Service certify the qualifications of the state park director. With the CCC program nearly defunct, the state now had to operate and maintain the parks on its own: by 1941 six of the system's eleven parks were at least partly open to the public, but parks received less than a quarter of the board's appropriation. During World War II the board made parts of several parks, including Gold Head Branch, Myakka River, and Fort Clinch, available for military use, and wartime rationing cut attendance from nearly 85,000 in 1942 to about 52,000 in 1943. A 1945 law placed the Florida Park Service under the board's direct supervision, funded by its own appropriation, so that the park director reported to the board rather than to the state forester.
Segregation and race
From their inception until the mid-1960s, Florida's state parks were racially segregated. African-American CCC enrollees were placed in segregated companies and worked on many of the earliest parks in the state. Company #5480 built parts of Myakka River State Park, while other companies were sent to Torreya State Park and Florida Caverns State Park. Local white communities often opposed the placement of African-American CCC camps near their towns.
Despite this work, African-American visitors were excluded from most Florida state parks until Little Talbot Island State Park opened in 1952 as a separate, segregated facility for African Americans, part of a broader pattern of parallel park provision under Jim Crow. In the larger parks, particularly those with beaches, the Board of Forestry and Parks generally provided separate facilities for Black visitors, though this proved impractical at every park; at the proposed Santa Rosa State Park it set aside an area for a segregated Scout camp beside the separate swimming beach. The board was less willing to allow mixed use: a request to hold an interracial outing at the camp facilities at O'Leno was denied.
Segregation was still explicit in the park system's public-facing operations at the end of the 1950s. The board's 1957–1959 Biennial Report described North Little Talbot Island State Park as being "for White people" and South Little Talbot Island State Park, on the same barrier island, as "for Colored people," and reported separate construction, fishing piers, combination buildings, ranger residences, in the "Colored Area" of parks including St. Andrews, Tomoka, and Jim Woodruff. Other units, Magnolia Lake State Park and North Suwannee River State Park, were designated wholly for African-American use. The legislature funded the arrangement directly: capital outlay appropriations for the Board of Parks and Historic Memorials in 1957 listed separate items for "white" and "colored" areas at Jim Woodruff State Park, alongside new African-American areas at Butler Beach and John C. Beasley Memorial Park.
Postwar expansion In 1946, at the urging of Florida Historical Society president Karl A. Bickel and with the support of Governor Millard Caldwell, the Park Service hired the state's first staff archaeologist, John W. Griffin, whose remit covered archaeological sites throughout Florida and not only those in state parks. The Madira Bickel Mound, donated in 1948, was the first site acquired by the system primarily for its archaeological significance.