Tag Archives: Barber Pool

Oppose Nestle water from Ginnie Springs and Madison Blue Spring @ SRWMD 2019-12-10

You can help oppose Nestlé’s water withdrawals from the Floridan Aquifer, at the next Suwannee River Water Management District (SRWMD) board meeting in Live Oak.

You can sign one of many petitions, such as one by SumOfUs.

Even better, you can come object to that extension. I ask people to come to every SRWMD board meeting, and maybe you can make this one.

Best, you can file a comment with SRWMD.

When: 9:00 AM, Tuesday, December 20 10, 2019

Where: SRWMD Headquarters, 9225 County Road 49, Live Oak, FL 32060-7056

What: SRWMD Board meeting

You can also ask SRWMD to review Nestlé’s withdrawal permit at Madison Blue Spring on the Withlacoochee River.

These are Nestlé’s landholdings next to Madison Blue Spring, according to the Madison County Property Appraiser:

[Nestle-madison-blue-spring]

For comparison, this little bit on the Withlacoochee River is Madison Blue Spring State Park, smaller than Nestlé’s main bottling plant. Continue reading →

Barber Pool, early 20th century

Update 2024-05-01: Fixed image links and a few typos, and added strip mine too near the Okefenokee swamp.

Floridians worried about springs drying up: it already happened to this one. A sad channel with no flow in Saunders Park once was a large and famous spring-fed pool, remembered by many in Valdosta, Georgia, both those who went there and those who were refused.

Flow channel, 15:45:07,, Former artesian spring 30.8288170, -83.3018410 The man who built Barber Pool at that spring on River Street, E.R. Barber, was the first Coca-Cola bottler outside of Atlanta, an inventor, and also the builder of the current home of the Valdosta-Lowndes County Chamber of Commerce. The Barber-Pittman House is on the National Register of Historic Places. That big house on the main drag, Ashley Street, just north of downtown Valdosta, was willed to the citizens of Valdoosta by his daughter, Ola Barber-PIttman.

Here’s what Barber Pool looked like in its heyday.

Slide, Spring-fed

[Slide]

Thanks to Continue reading →