Kingsley Lake

Kingsley Lake is an ancient, spring-fed sinkhole in Clay County, about two miles across and nearly a perfect circle — pilots flying over it nicknamed it Silver Dollar Lake. Camp Blanding, a Florida National Guard training base established on its shores in 1939, trained more than 745,000 soldiers during World War II, when it briefly became Florida's fourth-largest city, and still operates today, occupying much of the lake's perimeter. Strickland's Landing, the lake's public swim beach, closed in 2002 after more than fifty years, and there's no remaining public boat ramp — the sole ramp sits on Camp Blanding property, open only to installation access holders or paying members of the property owners' association. Kingsley Lake Park, a small park directly on the water, is the genuinely public foothold that remains: a tennis court, picnic pavilion, and playground, though no swim beach. The free Camp Blanding Museum and Memorial Park, housed in a restored WWII barracks, covers the base's wartime history. Starke, six miles west, is the honest nearest town for dining, groceries, and the hospital — not Keystone Heights, which despite showing up in general searches actually sits twelve miles away on a different lake, Lake Geneva.