Ney Landrum State Park, known until 2025 as St. Marks River Preserve State Park, is a Florida state park on the upper St. Marks River, about east of Tallahassee in Leon and Jefferson counties. The park occupies a band of floodplain, flatwoods and sandhill between U.S. Highway 27 on the north and Tram Road on the south, and is managed by the Division of Recreation and Parks of the Florida Department of Environmental Protection (DEP).
The Board of Trustees of the Internal Improvement Trust Fund bought the land in 2006 from the St. Joe Timberland Company of Delaware for $10,617,647 through the Florida Forever program, as the first phase of the Upper St. Marks River Corridor project. The purchase was intended to buffer the river from development, protect the water quality of the river and of Apalachee Bay, and help link conservation lands in a wildlife corridor running from Tallahassee to the Gulf of Mexico. The park opened to visitors in 2007 as the 161st unit of the state park system.
Because most of the uplands were managed as commercial pine timberland for roughly six decades before the state bought them, the park is classified as a state preserve and is managed primarily for restoration rather than for intensive recreation. It has no on-site staff, and facilities are limited to a trailhead off Tram Road and about of multi-use trails on former forest roads. In 2025 the Florida Legislature renamed the park for Ney Landrum, director of the Florida Park Service from 1970 to 1989.
Name
In 2025 the Florida Legislature passed CS/CS/HB 209, the State Park Preservation Act, a measure prompted by the withdrawn 2024–2025 Great Outdoors Initiative. Under that initiative, announced by DEP in August 2024, the department had proposed an 18-hole golf course, lodges of up to 350 rooms, pickleball courts and disc golf courses at nine state parks; the plans were withdrawn after strong bipartisan opposition. The act bars sporting facilities and lodging establishments from state parks and requires that parks be managed for conservation-based recreational uses. Section 5 of the act redesignated St. Marks River Preserve State Park, in Leon and Jefferson counties, as Ney Landrum State Park. The bill passed the House 112–0, was approved by the governor on May 22, 2025, as chapter 2025-76, Laws of Florida, and took effect on July 1, 2025.
Ney Cody Landrum (January 17, 1931 – July 12, 2017), described in the bill analysis as the father of the modern Florida park service, was born in Levy County, Florida, moved to Tallahassee as a small child and was educated at Florida State University, where he took a master's degree after serving as a United States Marine Corps officer during the Korean War. He was appointed director of Florida State Parks in 1970 and held the post until his retirement in 1989, a period in which the park system grew into one of the largest in the country and its administration was professionalized. After retiring he served as the first executive director of the National Association of State Park Directors and wrote The State Park Movement in America: A Critical Review (2004), a history of state parks in the United States. The Governor and Cabinet conferred on him the title Director Emeritus of Florida State Parks, and he was inducted into the Florida Tourism Hall of Fame in 2011.
History Early inhabitants A regional overview prepared for the park's management plan concluded that the area has been used more or less continuously for thousands of years, with a possible brief lull after the destruction of the Apalachee missions in 1704 and before Creek migration from Georgia began a few years later. Highly significant Paleoindian sites have been recorded a few miles away near the spring-fed Aucilla and Wacissa rivers and at Wakulla Springs.
Park staff have recorded five historic-period archaeological sites inside the park, recorded in the Florida Master Site File under such names as Otter Spring Bridges and The Crossing. All appear to be former bridge sites or scatters of historic artifacts associated with crossing points on the St. Marks River; one includes squared timbers apparently placed deliberately in the riverbed. All were in good condition, and none had been evaluated for National Register of Historic Places significance as of 2011. No historic structures have been recorded in the park.
Nine further sites recorded in the Florida Master Site File lie on the park's immediate borders and may extend into it; most are small artifact scatters that probably represent short-term campsites and that cannot be assigned to a cultural period for want of diagnostic pottery or stone tools. Two were initially recorded as indeterminate scatters not eligible for the National Register, but Phase II investigations by R. Christopher Goodwin and Associates in 2009 found an intact paleosurface at one, likely dating to the Early Archaic or Paleoindian period, and a comparable paleosurface at the other; both were subsequently determined eligible under Criterion D. Five of the nine were determined ineligible and two were left unevaluated, among them the Castro site, recorded by archaeologist Calvin Jones in 1968 as a historic-period Native American site of the Leon-Jefferson period; Jones suggested it might be the site of the Spanish mission Assumption del Puerto, though no diagnostic mission-period artifacts were found. A further site outside the park, with components ranging from the Paleoindian period to the twentieth century, is considered National Register eligible, and the management plan treats it as an indication of what may survive within the park.
Only one location inside the park has been tested below the surface, at the site of a planned trailhead off Tram Road that had been heavily disturbed by logging. Two shovel tests, dug to one meter at the sites of a proposed composting toilet and information kiosk, produced no artifacts, but a surface walkover recovered whiteware, a fragment of prehistoric grit-tempered pottery and two chert flakes. A fragment of a Herty cup, a clay vessel used to collect pine gum, found on a nearby dirt road, hinted at naval stores activity.
Roads, timber and turpentine A historic highway linking Pensacola and St. Augustine appears to have skirted the park's northern boundary. Planned as a major overland route connecting east and west Florida through Tallahassee, the section between Tallahassee and St. Augustine was built under contract by John Bellamy in the 1820s and became known as the Bellamy Road; an 1825 plat map shows it following the approximate route of modern Old St. Augustine Road, now U.S. Highway 27, which forms the park's northern edge.
Many of the roads inside the park are themselves historic, some of them dating to the mid-19th century. The main north–south road was well established by 1954 and probably followed an older informal network; aerial photographs from 1937 and 1941 show roads along the high ground between Gum Creek and the St. Marks River. A bridge crossing shown on USGS topographic mapping in the northern part of the park may also be historic.
The Tallahassee region took part in the naval stores industry that began after the American Civil War and continued into the 1940s, as well as in the timber industry. Aerial photographs indicate that the tract has been used chiefly for agriculture, timber production or turpentine production since at least the 1930s, and it also supported private hunting leases. Detailed research on ownership before that date has not been carried out. Immediately before the state purchase, the land belonged to the St. Joe Paper Company, which once held vast acreages in the Florida Panhandle.
Acquisition and establishment
The tract lies within the Upper St. Marks River Corridor, an "A"-ranked Florida Forever project whose stated goal is to buffer the upper river from development and preserve its water quality while protecting the floodplain's natural communities. Completed, the project would create a permanent wildlife corridor along the St. Marks River linking local, state and federal conservation lands from Tallahassee to the Gulf of Mexico.
The Board of Trustees purchased the 2,589.67-acre parcel on January 24, 2006, from St. Joe Timberland Company of Delaware, LLC, for $10,617,647, using Florida Forever funds; the warranty deed is dated June 28, 2006, and the Trustees hold the land in fee simple. The sale, brokered with the assistance of The Nature Conservancy, was announced the following day as part of a wider series of transactions through which the state, the Conservancy and St. Joe had protected more than 155,000 acres of company timberland. DEP secretary Colleen M. Castille said the purchase would "protect water quality in the St. Marks River and nearby waterways, and preserve native habitat for gopher tortoises, migrant bird species and the threatened Florida black bear."
On December 21, 2006, the Trustees transferred management authority to DEP's Division of Recreation and Parks under lease agreement No. 4535, a fifty-year lease expiring on December 20, 2056, which stipulates that the property be used for the conservation and protection of natural and historical resources. The park opened for recreational use in 2007 as the 161st unit of the Florida state park system. Its first unit management plan was approved on June 10, 2011, following a public workshop on February 15 and an advisory group meeting the next day. The Trustees have acquired no additional land for the park since 2006, although the plan's optimum boundary identifies a second phase of the Florida Forever project running south from Tram Road to Natural Bridge Battlefield Historic State Park, together with an outparcel inside the park.
Geography Physiography The park lies in the shallow valley of the St. Marks River corridor, between U.S. Highway 27 on the north and Tram Road on the south. Land immediately east and west of the park rises above , characteristic of the Tallahassee Hills, but the highest point within the park is about , in the far north and along the western boundary. From these rises the ground falls into a broad floodplain with almost no relief, at elevations of .
Geology and soils The dominant geological feature near the park is the Cody Scarp, described in the management plan as one of the most persistent topographic breaks in Florida. The escarpment marks an ancient shoreline and divides the Northern Highlands, including the Tallahassee Hills, from the coastal lowlands to the south, which take in the Woodville Karst Plain and the River Valley Lowlands. Tram Road closely follows the scarp near the park; just west of the park, elevations rise from over a short distance, a slope of about nine percent. Twenty-one soil units occur within the park boundary, and no minerals of commercial value are known.
Hydrology The St. Marks River rises in eastern Leon County near Capitola, where it is little more than a chain of connected wetlands, and gathers enough drainage to become a recognizable dark-water creek by the time it crosses U.S. Highway 27 into the park. Within the park the river is strongly seasonal: whole reaches commonly dry up or shrink to isolated shallow pools during droughts, while heavy rainfall can send large volumes of fast-moving water through the river and floodplain. The river acquires reliable base flow only well downstream of the park, about south of Tram Road, where the second-magnitude Horn Spring and Chicken Branch Spring discharge into it; below that point it can be paddled.