Yulee Sugar Mill Ruins Historic State Park

Yulee Sugar Mill is the ruin the Union couldn't find. David Levy Yulee — Florida's first U.S. senator, the first Jewish member of the Senate, the railroad builder — ran the 5,000-acre Margarita Plantation on enslaved labor, the steam mill grinding the cane into syrup, molasses, and rum for thirteen years. When the war came the mill fed the Confederacy, the rivers running the sugar past the blockade; in May 1864 the Union force came up the Homosassa to destroy it, found the supply stockpile instead, and burned Yulee's house and his library on Tiger Tail Island. They never located the mill — and it never ran again anyway.

The ruins are the war's industrial remnant — the forty-foot limestone chimney, the iron gears, the cane press, the machinery that came from New York by sailing ship in 1851, still standing beside the road where the state park keeps them. The mill that supplied the Confederacy is the piece that survived; the senator's house and one of the South's largest libraries are what's gone.

The file keeps the plantation's full ledger — the enslaved labor that ran it, the senator's fortune in their work, the mill that fed the Confederate troops, and the freedom that came when the mill stopped. The ruins stand within five feet of the road, the chimney the landmark of the sugar economy the war ended.

Yulee Sugar Mill Ruins is the archive's surviving file — the enslaved-worked sugar mill that supplied the Confederacy, spared by the Union raid that burned Yulee's house, its chimney and gears standing by the road where the state keeps the ruin.