New Smyrna Sugar Mill Ruins: Florida's Antebellum Industry in Stone
Near Daytona, Florida
On the outskirts of New Smyrna Beach, a set of coquina stone walls rises out of the Florida scrub: the ruins of a sugar mill that operated briefly and violently in the eighteen thirties. The mill was built around eighteen thirty for the New York merchants William DePeyster and Henry Cruger, part of a wave of speculators who moved into East Florida after the United States took control of the territory and saw an opportunity in sugar cane. The plantation worked enslaved people to grow and process cane in a climate that was brutally suited to it.
When the Second Seminole War began in eighteen thirty-five, Seminole raiders burned the mill at the end of eighteen thirty-five. The coquina walls, cut from the same fossilized shellstone the Spanish used to build Saint Augustine, proved too hard to destroy. The ruins are now a Florida state park, one of the few standing traces of the short-lived East Florida sugar industry that preceded the war.
