Devil's Millhopper

Four miles outside Gainesville, Florida, the ground opens into a 120-foot pit, and the early settlers here named it for the Devil. They had a reason. The hole kept giving up bones.

It's a sinkhole, 500 feet across, a funnel of limestone that collapsed and dissolved over a very long time as acidic groundwater ate it from beneath. As the walls eroded, they spat out what they'd buried: shark teeth, marine shells, the remains of animals nobody living had ever seen. The region was an ancient sea once, and later the ground saber-toothed cats and mastodons walked on. Their bones surfaced at the bottom of the pit.

The settlers couldn't account for prehistoric skeletons rising out of Florida earth, so they reached for the only explanation that fit. The hole's funnel shape looked like a mill's hopper, the chute a miller pours grain into. They decided the animals had gone down to the bottom to meet the Devil, and the hopper was how he was fed. One regional history puts the older version of it plainly: "a legend grew that it led to Hell and it became known as the Devil's Millhopper."

The Timucua told it first, and told it darker. In the version that survives — retold in a 2019 children's book where Chief Potano must save his daughter from a demon at the Millhopper — a demon opened the pit to swallow a chief's pursuing warriors and turned them to stone. The twelve springs that still trickle down the walls into the pond at the bottom, the story goes, are the tears of the men lost below.

You can walk down to them now. A wooden stairway drops to the floor of the bowl, where ferns and moss and cooler air make a small rainforest the rest of the scrub doesn't have. The springs run down it the way they always have. The bones keep coming up. Nobody has ever found the bottom of what fed the name.