Gamble Plantation Historic State Park in Manatee County, Florida

Photograph: Robert Gamble House Ellenton Florida 2019-2479 02.jpg by Paul R. Burley · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Restored from the credited Wikimedia Commons file, normalized to the consistent attraction-card frame and converted to WebP by 1stFlorida.com. Portrait originals retain their complete composition over a softly blurred extension of the same photograph.

Manatee County attraction

Gamble Plantation Historic State Park

Manatee County · Gulf Coast

The only surviving antebellum plantation house in south Florida, on 37th Avenue East at US 301 in Ellenton.

ABOUT THIS PLACE

Major Robert Gamble built it between 1845 and 1850 out of tabby, a concrete of lime, oyster shell, sand and water, with walls two feet thick and a colonnade around the front. The sugarcane plantation it stood at the center of reached three thousand five hundred acres, and probably more than two hundred enslaved people lived and worked on it at its height. Gamble sold up in 1856, in debt as sugar prices fell. In May 1865, with the Confederacy collapsed, its Secretary of State Judah P. Benjamin sheltered here while Federal troops searched for him, and got away to England with help from Captain Archibald McNeill, who was then living in the house. The United Daughters of the Confederacy bought the decaying property in 1925 and gave it to Florida; the state finished restoring it in 1927 and it was listed on the National Register in 1970. Also on the grounds are the Patten House of 1872, a forty thousand gallon cistern and the sugar mill ruins. Guided tours run

GETTING THERE

Get Directions ↗Official place website ↗

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