Drew Mansion site

The house at the center of Ellaville was built in the late 1860s by George Franklin Drew — the lumberman whose mill made the town, and later Florida's governor from 1877 to 1881. His mansion on the Suwannee was the kind of structure a company town was supposed to have overlooking it: the owner's seat, the landmark that told the settlement who it belonged to and how well it was doing.

It outlasted the town it watched. The sawmill economy collapsed after the turn of the century and Ellaville drained away — the post office closed in 1942 — but the mansion stood empty on the riverbank for another three decades until fire destroyed it in 1970. What is left is a Florida historical marker and a ruin site; the file's research note is careful with the geography, recording that the actual house site lies roughly half a mile northwest of the marker rather than beneath it.

The archive keeps the site as the anchor of Ellaville's documented story: a governor's house, a sawmill town, a river, and a fire — the whole sequence on the record.