Leon County

The county in brief

A traveler's read on Leon County

Five officially-designated Canopy Roads, all radiating outward from the Tallahassee city core, define the visual character of Leon County like no other US state capital region — Centerville, Magnolia, Meridian, Miccosukee, and Old St. Augustine Roads carry continuous arched green tunnels of southern live oak (Quercus virginiana) draped with Spanish moss, with the canopies grown together overhead from trees planted alongside the original 1820s-1840s plantation-era roadbeds and now over 150 years old. The five roads collectively run 78 miles and are designated as protected scenic corridors under Leon County ordinance, which prohibits any tree removal within the canopy zone without specific commission approval — the kind of land-use protection that the rest of the South Florida sprawl belt has not extended to its own historic oak corridors. Tallahassee is the only US state capital surrounded by such a canopy-road network; the closest comparable example anywhere in the country is the Old Spanish Trail through New Iberia, LA.

Leon County's 667 sq mi wrap the state-capital city of Tallahassee (population 201,731, the county seat and the only Florida state capital not located on a navigable waterway — the capital was sited here in 1824 specifically as a midpoint compromise between St. Augustine and Pensacola, with no commercial purpose other than territorial government), the main campus of Florida State University (the largest single-campus state-university enrollment in Florida at roughly 45,000 students per FSU Office of Institutional Research data) and the historically-Black Florida A&M University, and the entire eastern half of the Apalachicola National Forest (the largest of the three Florida national forests, at 632,000 acres). Wakulla Springs State Park at the southern county line holds one of the world's largest and deepest freshwater springs (185 ft measured depth, with an average discharge of 360 million gallons per day per USGS Florida Water Science Center spring-discharge monitoring); the park's lodge dates to 1937 (built by Edward Ball, the Du Pont heir who owned the surrounding land), and the riverboat ecotour fleet operates over manatee, alligator, and West Indian manatee habitat year-round. Apalachicola NF's Wakulla Ranger District permits 14-day dispersed at signed sites along Forest Service Road 13 and 333 with rigs to 35 ft. Tallahassee Municipal Code §11-37 prohibits overnight RV street parking citywide; commercial RV-friendly bases line I-10 and US-90.