Keystone Heights, Florida
Keystone Heights is in Northeast Florida about 25 miles northeast of Gainesville and 58 miles southwest of Jacksonville. It has an estimated population in 2020 of about 1,500.
I first learned about it many years ago when I lived in Jacksonville. It was a popular beach getaway back then and still is today.
The town is in the far southwestern corner of Clay County, whose county seat is Green Cove Springs, 30 miles to the northeast. This relative remoteness makes Keystone Heights a self-sufficient rural town.
Like so many towns and cities in Florida, Keystone Heights began as a development during the Florida Land Boom of the Roaring Twenties.
Before the boom, the area around Lake Brooklyn and Lake Geneva was populated with a small number of settlers.
The small community of Brooklyn was located about one mile north of the present location of Keystone Heights. It had a small hotel named the Brooklyn Hotel.