Upper and Lower Lake Lafayette in Tallahassee, Florida

Lake Lafayette is the string of lakes and swamp that forms the northern edge of Lafayette Heritage Trail Park and Tom Brown Park on Tallahassee's east side.

The City of Tallahassee says the system stretches from Weems Road to Chaires Cross Road and was originally a wet prairie, much like Gainesville's Paine's Prairie, that filled during heavy rains and drained through sinkholes into the Floridan Aquifer.

The agencies divide the lake differently. The City says two dams built around 1950 split it into three sections: Upper Lafayette, still a wet prairie; Piney Z Lake, an open water lake; and Lower Lafayette, which resembles a cypress-covered Louisiana bayou. Leon County's Lake Lafayette EcoSummary counts four sections, Upper Lake Lafayette, Lake Piney Z, Alford Arm and Lower Lake Lafayette, with limited connections between them, mostly at high water, so the county treats each as a separate lake with its own watershed.

Upper Lake Lafayette behaves like a prairie because most of its water ends up in a sinkhole.

Leon County's water quality summary says the dominant feature is Lafayette Sink in the northeastern portion of the lake, which drains into the Floridan Aquifer; in typical rainfall the area around the sink becomes a 354-acre lake, but after dry periods the lakebed can drain almost completely.

FWC's L. Kirk Edwards history page tells the same story in older terms. It says geologist Eli Sellards investigated four disappearing lakes north and east of Tallahassee in 1909, Iamonia, Jackson, Miccosukee and Lafayette, and that in a dry spell much of Lake Lafayette's water drained west into the aquifer through Fallschase Sink in the northern reaches of the lake, while in floods the lake flowed east into the St. Marks River. Early settlers grazed cattle on the dry, grassy bottom and called it Prairie Lake, FWC says.

Lake Lafayette shares that trait with other Tallahassee-area lakes. The Florida Department of Environmental Protection's Lake Jackson dry-down FAQ names lakes Miccosukee, Iamonia and Lafayette as sharing Lake Jackson's karst behavior, each with its own natural cycle.

People and railroads reshaped Lake Lafayette long before the dikes.

FWC's history page says at least 40 mounds and middens still sit around Lake Lafayette's edge, and that Congress gave the Marquis de Lafayette a township of land where he set up a colony on the lake shore to grow vineyards, olives and silkworms, an effort that quickly failed. The City adds that when the lakes drained, Native Americans hunted and gathered flint for tools and weapons on the lake bottom, and later farmers grazed cattle and planted crops in the lake soil.

The splits came in stages. FWC says that in the 1820s the entire northern shore was separated from Alford Arm and stabilized so the railroad, now CSX, could be built near the water, and that in 1948 the owners of Piney Z Plantation built earthen dikes in the middle of the lake, which was then alternately farmed and flooded for duck hunting. More dikes followed, and FWC says stabilized water levels interrupted the natural cycle of drought and flooding. The City dates the two dams to around 1950, and the county describes the changes as land alterations in the mid-1900s.

Leon County's sampling shows Upper Lake Lafayette has a history of elevated nutrients and chlorophyll-a and continues not to meet the state's numeric nutrient criteria.

The county EcoSummary says about 74 percent of the 14,792-acre Upper Lake Lafayette watershed is agriculture, rangeland, transportation, utilities, urban and residential land, and that the heavily urbanized Northeast Drainage Ditch and Lafayette Creek are its main water sources.

Source: Leon County Lake Lafayette EcoSummary, 2023. The county notes 2021 and early 2022 samples were blocked by construction, and chlorophyll-a figures from October 2014 to December 2020 were corrected after a 2022 DEP audit.

A cleanup target and a treatment plant sit upstream. The county says the U.S. EPA set a TMDL for Upper Lake Lafayette in March 2012 requiring a 36 percent cut in total phosphorus, and that the City of Tallahassee converted the Weems Pond Regional Stormwater Treatment Facility into an alum-injection facility that came online in October 2015. The same Leon County report records a fish kill in September 2019, when the lake was down to the level of the sinkhole and low oxygen killed fish crowded into a small area.

Piney Z Lake's chlorophyll-a and nutrient values regularly exceeded the criteria during the county's record, which the county blames on past herbicide use and grass carp that left an almost completely open water system with algal blooms. Replanting has followed, and the county's Lake Vegetation Index score of 51 placed the Piney Z plant community in the Healthy category. Lower Lake Lafayette, the county says, appears and functions like a cypress dominated swamp whose open water exists because of FWC's canoe trail maintenance.

Piney Z Lake became a fishing lake when it was drained and rebuilt in the 1990s, though the agencies give different years and sizes.

FWC's L. Kirk Edwards things to do page says the lake was pumped dry, exposing its bottom for the first time in half a century, its muck shaped into five spoil islands and six earthen fishing fingers, and then stocked with Florida bass, bream, redear sunfish and channel catfish.

Downstream, Lower Lake Lafayette is wilder. FWC says its L. Kirk Edwards Wildlife and Environmental Area, seven miles east of Tallahassee, takes in most of Lower Lake Lafayette and the Upper St. Marks River, and that Lake Lafayette there hosts one of the largest wood stork colonies in northwest Florida. The area began with a 1977 donation of nearly 700 acres to FWC and reached 1,782 acres after the 1,064-acre Wood Sink tract was added in 2009, according to FWC's history page.

Most visitors reach Lake Lafayette through Lafayette Heritage Trail Park, at the east end of Heritage Park Boulevard in the Piney Z Plantation subdivision.

The City says the park's largest parcel, formerly part of Piney Z Plantation, was acquired in December 1995 and a second in June 1996, for a total of 795.14 acres and $3,562,566.90, paid by the City and the Florida Communities Trust with Florida Forever funds. It has three picnic shelters, a universally accessible fishing pier, floating docks and a hand-launch-only boat ramp, and is open sunrise to sunset.

The Tallahassee park trails are measured. The City lists the Cadillac Mountain Bike Trail in two parts, West Cadillac at 1.35 miles and East Cadillac at 2.44 miles, a 0.9-mile beginner Loblolly option, and a 2.95-mile Shared Use Trail. With Tom Brown Park, the county's J. R. Alford Greenway and Apalachee Regional Park, and FWC's L. Kirk Edwards area, the City says these open spaces form a regional greenway of 3,900 acres.

Paddlers use the Lafayette Passage Paddling Trail, which the City says includes a short portage from Piney Z Lake into Lower Lake Lafayette for a 6 mile round trip to the western end of the lake. FWC's paddling notes say paddling is easiest when gauges near the launches read 1.0 feet or higher, that the trail is currently being rerouted, and that L. Kirk Edwards also has about 10 miles of nature trails and unpaved roads for hiking and biking.

Last verified: October 18, 2026, against the City of Tallahassee Lafayette Heritage Trail Park page, the FWC L. Kirk Edwards overview, things to do and history pages, Leon County's 2023 Lake Lafayette EcoSummary and DEP's dry-down FAQ.