New Smyrna Beach Historic District in Volusia County, Florida

Photograph: New Smyrna Hist Dist street01.jpg by Ebyabe · CC BY 2.5 · 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.

Volusia County attraction

New Smyrna Beach Historic District

Volusia County · Atlantic Coast

The oldest layer of a beach town, centered on Canal Street, Flagler Avenue and the riverfront.

ABOUT THIS PLACE

In 1768 a Scottish doctor named Andrew Turnbull landed close to fifteen hundred Greeks, Corsicans, Italians and Minorcans here to grow indigo, sugar cane and hemp for England. It was the largest single attempt at a colony in what became the United States, and it failed hard: hunger, disease, poor shelter and brutal work. The survivors walked out to St. Augustine in 1777. A coquina foundation forty feet by eighty still stands in Old Fort Park on North Riverside Drive, reached from Canal Street, and nobody is certain what it was. A Spanish fort, Turnbull's own house, a warehouse, a church and a shipyard have all been argued. Later builders kept using it: Ambrose Hull put a house on it in 1801, burned in 1812; Thomas Stamps ran a sugar plantation there, burned by Seminoles in 1835; John Sheldon built a forty-room hotel on it in 1854, shelled by Union gunboats in 1863. The Sugar Mill Ruins, another coquina structure from the early 1800s, sit about three miles southwest

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