Dunnellon

Dunnellon was founded in 1887 as a railroad town named for pioneer railroad man J.F. Dunn, and for its first two years it was just another stop in the pine woods where the Rainbow River meets the Withlacoochee. That changed in 1889, when Albertus Vogt discovered hard-rock phosphate nearby — some of the purest in the world — and Dunnellon exploded into Florida's first true mining boom town. Mines with names like Tiger Rag, Early Bird, and Eagle worked the deposits along the Rainbow River, and phosphate was barged down the Withlacoochee to the Gulf. The boom ran roughly through the early 1910s before the easy rock played out, and the town's fortunes faded with it through the 1920s.

What the mines left behind turned out to be the real asset: Rainbow Springs, a first-magnitude spring system pumping out hundreds of millions of gallons of 72-degree water a day. The springs operated for decades as a private roadside attraction in Florida's golden tourism era before closing in the 1970s; the state later acquired the property, and it reopened as Rainbow Springs State Park, with the man-made waterfalls and gardens from the attraction days still in place. The town itself settled into the role it still plays — a small incorporated city of a few thousand people serving a much larger rural trade area across the 34431 and 34432 ZIP codes.

The modern chapter is being written by water and by Ocala's growth. The Rainbow River is now the area's economic engine — tubing, kayaking, and paddleboarding draw heavy seasonal crowds — while Dunnellon's Historic Village district has filled in with shops and restaurants, and the annual Boomtown Days festival nods to the phosphate era. Meanwhile, golf-course communities like Rainbow Springs Country Club and Juliette Falls, plus a steady supply of affordable acreage, have made greater Dunnellon a quiet beneficiary of Marion County's boom, including spillover from the World Equestrian Center side of Ocala roughly a half hour northeast.