Ellaville
A ghost town in Ellaville, Florida, Ellaville is filed here for what the record attaches to it. Former sawmill settlement near the Withlacoochee and Suwannee confluence. The archive files it under ghost towns. The dossier holds 1 documented fact — a documented spine with no haunting reports attached. Visitor status is unverified; confirm before making the trip.
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Is Ellaville haunted?
No claims are filed here — the record keeps this place for its documented history, not for a haunting on file.
The record — long form
Ellaville grew up where the Withlacoochee River meets the Suwannee in Madison County, and it belonged to one man. George Franklin Drew built his sawmill operation there in the mid-1860s, and the town that formed around it — church, stores, railroad station, a population that reached toward a thousand at its height — took his mansion as its landmark and his payroll as its reason. Drew went on to serve as Florida's governor from 1877 to 1881; the town never had a second industry.
The end was the standard company-town sequence. The timber was cut over and the mill economy failed after 1900; the mansion that had presided over the riverbank burned in 1970. The state marker account fixes 1942 as the year the post office closed — the file's research note flags it correctly as the terminal event in the record, not the day the last resident left.
Today the site lies near the U.S. 90 bridge beside Suwannee River State Park: a ghosted grid on one of Florida's best-known river junctions, remembered by a marker, an old store ruin, and the foundations the floods and the forest left.
Documented history
George F. Drew developed the sawmill town in the mid-1860s. It declined after 1900; its post office closed in 1942. The town's documented rise and abandonment is the record the rest of the file stands on. The record holds it as fact — documented, not retold. Sources including 'Drew Mansion Site and the Town of Ellaville' carry the record. The entry's timeline holds it; the lore holds the rest.
Verified historyFlorida Division of Historical Resources
Sources on file
- 01Drew Mansion Site and the Town of EllavilleFlorida Division of Historical Resources · government · A1
Field notes & open questions
1942 denotes the terminal post-office closure in the marker account, not proof that every resident departed that year. Actual town location differs from historical marker.