Just a short drive off Route One, beneath the tall moss-draped oaks in Port Orange, Florida lies the crumbled stone walls and towering chimneys of the Dunlawton Sugar Mill, silent witnesses to centuries of Florida’s turbulent past.

What visitors see today is a  picturesque ruin shaded by subtropical growth, which was once the center of ambition, industry and survival on Florida’s volatile frontier.

The story began in the early 1800s, when the Spanish Crown still held sway over Florida.   Wealthy settlers were drawn to the fertile lands near the Halifax River, ideal for growing sugarcane, cotton and citrus.

Around 1804 a man named Patrick Dean received a large land grant here and established one of the first plantations in the region.  Using enslaved labor, he cleared the land and built a grand sugar mill, and planted cane across the rolling fields.

But prosperity was fragile.   The Seminole Indians, forced from their ancestral lands resisted encroachment.   In 1835 at the outbreak of the Second Seminole War, warriors swept across the region torching 16 plantations as symbols of oppression.

The Dunlawton Mill was burned to the ground and Dean’s family abandoned their dream.

In the years that followed, new owners attempted to rebuild.   The Anderson family purchased the ruins and tried once again to coax profit from the cane fields.

They brought in new machinery including a sugar cane press, a steam furnace and iron kettles to make molasses and rum.  They  built coquina walls to house the boiling vat’s and used enslaved African labor to keep the mill running, 

Hostile climate, disease, war and fluctuating sugar prices made success fleeting.   The plantation was finally abandoned for good by the mid 1800s, leaving behind the stone bones of the mill and the scars of a harsh era.

Time transformed the ruins into something different by the late 1800s.   The Old Sugar Mill bece a curiosity for tourists riding the rails down Florida’s East Coast in the 1940s and an enterprising family even turned the site into a quirky roadside attraction called Bongoland, complete with life-sized dinosaur statues made of concrete.

Now preserved as Dunlawton Sugar Mill Gardens, the site is both memorial and sanctuary as families stroll among the lush gardens with butterflies and the air is fragrant with blooming camellias and azaleas.