The Braden River is a rare bird.
It’s a geologic rarity because it flows mostly north instead of south.
It is fed by rainfall that trickles down through tiny tributaries amid the cow pastures of eastern Manatee County and gathers strength as it cuts a path through ranchland, suburbia and urban areas to empty into the Manatee River.
While its few north-flowing counterparts — the Nile River in Africa and the Saint Johns River on the east coast of Florida — are famous, the Braden River is well-known only among those who live and work near it.
But the river has a long and rich history, from its wild years as a place that spawned tales of moonshiners and supported sugar plantations, to the leafy enclave whose cool rush of limpid water is barely detectable behind golf courses and suburban homes.
The population along it has multiplied from sparse rural denizens to tens of thousands of suburbanites, with neighborhoods like the Harborage, River Club, Lakewood Ranch and River Forest. Development has affected its ecology, but the river’s bounty has remained clean — benefiting, in part, from careful protection.
It is the source of fresh water for Bradenton, officials say.
“It’s unique because parts of this river are held back as a reservoir that provides drinking water to over 60,000 people,” says Charlie Hunsicker, director of the county’s Natural Resources Department. “Recognizing and protecting this irreplaceable source of drinking water to the city of Bradenton is very important.”
A rich resource
The Braden River has long exerted a magnetic pull with its banks teeming with lush vegetation, animals and birds, and its waters a place to fish and boat.
When the Marineland neighborhood was built on the banks of the Braden River after World War II, it “offered to people the kind of wild Florida frontier you normally had to go 50 miles inland to find,” Hunsicker says.
Marineland resident Denise Kleiner is a stockbroker who works from her home overlooking the water. Originally from Sanibel Island, she came to love Braden River’s convoluted twists and turns, its elegance as a retreat for kayakers and canoeists, its rich wildlife.
“I saw a whole family of limpkins in my driveway once,” she recalls. A limpkin, which looks like a cross between a crane and a rail, is a wading bird with a 42-inch wingspan and a piercing call. It is widespread in the American tropics, but in the United States is found only in Florida, where it can satisfy its dietary requirement for a certain freshwater snail, according to BirdingGuide.com.
Two years ago, Kleiner founded the Old Braden River Historical Society, now a nonprofit group, in efforts to protect the river’s fragile environment and preserve historical sites along its banks.
Those sites include Linger Lodge, a funky restaurant and campground shaded by huge oaks that has for decades inhabited the river’s shady edge, and Jiggs Landing, a former fish camp the county purchased to renovate into a park.
Email Story
Printer Friendly 
Quick Job Search
@Nyx.replyAnswerText@