Another Camping Trip

[Eva Elisabeth]

In Ellenton, on the Manatee River near Sarasota, is another beautiful house that is hidden in a quiet, quaint park: the Gamble Plantation. The mansion of the former sugar plantation is the only surviving antebellum plantation house in South Florida.
   
   
At the close of the Seminole War in 1842, the United States opened the Florida frontier to settlement by European Americans. Virginian born Major Robert Gamble, Jr. (1813 - 1906), who had served in the war, received 160 acres for homesteading, and arrived at the Manatee River site in 1844. He developed the manison. Construction began in 1845, and took over five years. Its eighteen columns and two-foot-thick walls are build of red bricks and tabby, a regional material made of shells, sand, and oyster-shell lime. Tabby was developed as a substitute for brick because of the shortage of clay. The techniques were brought south by European-American planters and their African-American slaves.

Gamble likely held more than 600 slaves to work the property and process the sugar cane. His sugar mill housed the best sugar processing machinery then available in the south. During the 1840's and early 1850's, Gamble was the leading producer of sugar and molasses in Florida.
Sugar rollers:
   
Due to a declining sugar market and debts, Gamble had to sell the property in 1856. With the outbreak of the Civil War, most of the slaves and machinery was sold and the plantation was abandoned. The sugar mill was destroyed by Union raiders in 1864.

Next to the house is a covered, 40,000-gallon cistern with a wood-shake roof, which Gamble had built to supply the household's fresh water needs. Fish were kept in the cistern to eat insects and help keep the water clean.
   
Alledgedly, Judah P. Benjamin stayed at the plantation for two weeks in May 1865 while making his escape from Federal troops, disguised as a French journalist, "M. Bonfal", and as a "Mr. Howard".
During the Civil War, the mansion was occupied by Captain Archibald McNeill, a Confederate blockade runner, and at that time the Confederacy's Deputy Commissary for the Manatee District. When Federal offers of a reward of $ 40,000 brought searchers to the plantation, McNeill aided Benjamin in escaping to the Bahamas. From there, he sailed to England, and arrived in London on August 30, 1865.
This is the room where J.P. Benjamin might have slept:
   
There's a litte, but lovingly done exhibition, and the guided tour provides a lot of fascinating information. I like such little, less overcrowded and less "professionally polished" sites, IMO there you can imagine former times and life the best.

Finally for Betty - a Grimsley saddle:

   

BTW: Happy Easter!