People who visit this region of Volusia County known as the River of Lakes Heritage Corridor quickly value its amiable and stable character. Visits convey a sense of small-town life familiar to many from where they live or otherwise remembered from earlier times, yet nonetheless combined with opportunities for adventure hardly familiar at all.

Some come here for houseboating, others for skydiving, for harness racing and for a program that combines bicycle safety training with touring unique to Florida in the town of Lake Helen.

Visitors find a region that apart from a brief mid-to-late-19th-century heyday with tourism has more simply been home across the centuries to people drawn by remarkably good sub-tropical living.

Today this shows in horse ranching and recreational trails, in the preservation of small towns and historic districts, in rural landscapes seasonally wildflower strewn, in exceptional town tree cover and schools of highest caliber from Montessori kindergartens to Stetson University.

But first settlers here already enjoyed the good life.

They were a hunter-gatherer people called the Mayacans, who lived bountifully from fish, shellfish, deer, bear, bird, fruits and berries and who built comfortable homes of thatch. They lived along the river that Spanish colonizers later named Rio San Juan, today’s St. Johns. It’s a 310-mile river notable apart from its beauty because it flows north and because it drops from its source to mouth a scant 30 feet, or on average less than an inch a mile.

Almost literally, the St. Johns makes no waves.

Traces of the region’s early dwellers remain in their shell mounds still found (where not carted away for early road-building) on Hontoon Island near DeLand, downstream at Mount Royal and at less apparent sites elsewhere. Samples of artwork afforded by Mayacan leisure have been retrieved and preserved at regional museums, though by the late 1600s, Mayacan culture had been decimated by missionization, disease and warfare under Spanish rule that had begun in the late 1500s.

The void left by Mayacan disappearance had been filled by immigrant Seminoles at the time that John Bartram -- the “King’s botanist" -- and his son “Billy" made their journeys of discovery up the St. Johns as far as Puzzle Lake, parallel to today’s Titusville.

In his Travels, written several years after his second visit in 1774, William Bartram described (with eager unrestraint), "What a beautiful display of vegetation is here before me! seemingly unlimited in extent and variety: how the dew-drops twinkle and play upon the sight, trembling on the tips of the lucid, green savanna, sparking as the gem that flames on the turban of the eastern prince."

Now the bounty and beauty would chiefly please early Americans since many British soon decamped after the American Revolution (even though Florida was not one of the 13 original colonies, provisionally joining the Union only in 1821 after a second brief period of Spanish rule).

Some few settlers from the failed coastal New Smyrna colony, freed blacks and “Floridianos" with Spanish land grants settled along the river in Volusia, but mainly the influx came from among Seminoles and Southerners who were more willing to farm these lands than the avaricious gold-seeking Spanish, who had remained largely garrisoned in St. Augustine.

Although settlers found hardship – scourges of yellow fever, typhus and smallpox worsened by hunger or worse when illness struck or crops failed – reports of visitors like John James Audubon and later of more promotional writers made Florida synonymous with rapture and beauty..

Audubon, the celebrated ornithologist, visited a plantation near today’s DeLeon Springs State Park, where in 1832 he described nearby “a small island covered with wild orange trees, the luxuriance and freshness of which were not less pleasing to the sight, than the perfume of their flowers was to the smell."

Like Eden, this tranquility soon vanished in the maelstrom of settler-provoked Seminole wars and then war between the states.

But during a brief interim between the wars, tourism found a foothold in the region. Its beauties captured the first rush of northerners reaping wealth from the Industrial Revolution.

The first steamboats began operating up the St. Johns from Jacksonville, by 1851 connecting Jacksonville with the settlement of Enterprise on Lake Monroe (one of the many lakes of the River of Lakes). The St. Johns would soon open up the lower state to widespread settlement and usher in modern Florida.