How Spring Hill Got Its Name

The area had been on Hernando County maps since 1856, but that was just land. The town itself arrived in 1967, built from scratch as a planned development by the Deltona Corporation and the Mackle Brothers. They had a name picked out, Spring Lake, and used it through all the planning documents. Then they checked the local records and found the name was taken. So they settled on Spring Hill.

That is the whole story, and it tells you everything about how the place works. Spring Hill was a product before it was a town. It was a mid-century Florida land development sold by the acre, and it still reads as one. The streets are wide, the layout is orderly, and the whole thing has the feel of a brochure that got built anyway.

The developers did leave one monument to their original plan. The Spring Hill waterfall at US 19 and Spring Hill Drive was the development's original gateway feature. It is still there, a little slice of manufactured nature marking the entrance to a manufactured community. It is not subtle. It was never meant to be.

What Spring Hill lacks in naming originality, it makes up for in roadside character. The town sits on the doorstep of Weeki Wachee Springs, the live mermaid show that has been running since the 1940s. Just up the highway, a pink apatosaurus stands sentinel on US 19, marking the spot where a dinosaur-shaped filling station once did business. The dinosaur is still there. The gas is not.

The numbers tell a story of a place that is more permanent than its origins suggest. The population is 118,814 people, with a median age of 43.3 years. There are 48,593 housing units, and 3,608 of them sit vacant. Only 1,264 homes are held for seasonal or recreational use, which is a small fraction of the total. This is not a vacation town. People live here.

The median home value is $248,400, and the median gross rent is $1,301. The median household income is $66,557, and the unemployment rate sits at 6.1 percent. Just under a fifth of residents, 19.7 percent, hold a bachelor's degree or higher. These are workaday numbers, the kind you find in a suburb that grew up and forgot it was supposed to be a sales pitch.

The Nature Coast Botanical Gardens offer a quieter kind of Florida, all native plants and walking paths, a counterpoint to the mermaids and the dinosaurs. It is the sort of place that makes you wonder what Spring Hill would have been called if the developers had thought to look around first. Spring Gardens, maybe. Or just plain Home.

Instead, they went with the second choice, and the second choice stuck. Spring Hill is the name on the water tower, the name on the exit signs, the name on the mail. Spring Lake is a footnote, a nearly-was, a developer's first draft that got crossed out at the last minute.

The town got the name it got, and it made it work. The waterfall still runs. The dinosaur still stands. The mermaids still perform, as they have since the 1940s. Spring Hill may not have gotten the name its builders wanted, but it got the one it kept, and that has turned out to be enough.