09/21/2026
Two massive statues disappeared from a popular Florida park over 40 years ago, and to this day, nobody knows where they went.
Long before any of that, Native Americans called this stretch of the St. Johns home. Settlers followed, and by the late 1800s, tourists started showing up too, drawn to the spring the same way people still are today.
The park took the Ponce de León name in the late 1800s to cash in on Florida's tourism boom, even though the real Ponce de León never came within 80 miles of the place. By the 1950s it was a full-blown attraction, complete with a water skiing elephant named Sally.
At the entrance stood two statues. Ponce de León and a companion figure known as the "Bathing Beauty." In March 1954, a visitor named Dorothy Berner was photographed there, hand in hand with the Ponce de León statue. Midcentury Florida at its most charming, the kind of spot people posed in front of long before anyone had a phone to do it with.
Then the park closed in the mid-1960s. By the time the state bought it in 1982, both statues were gone. No sale record. No official explanation. Just gone.
A local historian who once managed the park has a theory, the statues were bolted to a single concrete base, which means whoever took them either had serious equipment or serious help from someone on the inside. Nobody has ever found them. Not in a collector's yard, not in a barn, not anywhere.
DeLeon Springs is reachable by pontoon from our dock. A longer trip than Blue Springs, but worth it if you want to see where this story took place for yourself.
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Story details via the Volusia Beacon.
📸 Historic photo: Johnson, Francis P. Dorothy Berner holding the hand of the Ponce De Leon statue - De Leon Springs, Florida. 1954-03. State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory. Accessed 18 Sep. 2026. https://www.floridamemory.com/items/show/71987
