Dunlawton Sugar Mill Gardens

ABOUT THIS PLACE

Patrick Dean, a Bahamian merchant, took a Spanish land grant in 1804 and worked a 995-acre indigo and sugarcane plantation with enslaved labor. He was killed in 1818 during the First Seminole War. Sarah Anderson and her sons bought the property in 1832 for four thousand five hundred dollars and named it Dunlawton. On January 17, 1836, militia under Major Putnam reached the plantation to find the house and the slave quarters already burning, part of the rising that opened the Second Seminole War. The mill ruins are coquina block and brick, with the gear mechanism of the cane press, the iron boiling kettles and the steam furnace still in place, one of the earliest surviving sets of sugar machinery in the country. It went on the National Register on August 28, 1973. From 1948 to 1952 the site was a small theme park called Bongoland, named for a baboon kept there, and five concrete dinosaurs built over chicken wire still stand among the oaks. J. Saxton Lloyd landscaped it in 1963 and gave it to the county