Dummett Plantation Mill Ruins

History of the Old Dummett Plantation Mill Ruins

The Dummett Plantation Mill ruins are the remains of an early-19th-century sugar mill and rum distillery once operated by the Dummett family on Florida’s Atlantic coast. They are among the most visible pieces of the state’s brief but dramatic “sugar boom” era that ended during the Second Seminole War.

The ruins stand inside Tomoka State Park in present-day Ormond Beach, Volusia County, on the west side of the Tomoka River basin. When the site was active in the 1820s–1830s, it lay at the heart of a 2,000-acre sugar plantation assembled by Colonel Thomas H. Dummett, a retired British Marine officer and father of citrus pioneer Douglas Dummett.

Colonel Thomas H. Dummett, Plantation Owner

Colonel Thomas Henry Dummett, a former British Marine officer and planter, established a vast sugar plantation in 1825 when he acquired the adjoining estates of John Bunch and John Addison, land that once formed part of John Moultrie’s Rosetta plantation. This property, roughly 2,000 acres, lay on the west side of the Tomoka basin, about a mile west of what is now Tomoka State Park.

Dummett quickly transformed the site into a thriving operation, erecting a sugar mill and a rum distillery powered by the area’s first steam-driven cane-crushing mill. Dummett apparently shipped his steam boiler engine from Barbados to use in processing the sugarcane produced at his plantation, and commissioned Reuben Loring to build the sugar mill and rum distillery. The houses and outbuildings came from Bunch’s earlier plantation. During grinding season, about 100 enslaved workers and 40 local Native Americans labored to extract cane juice, which was boiled into molasses and stored in three large cisterns before being distilled into rum. The Native Americans often exchanged freshly caught game for the sugar works’ products.

According to the memoirs of Dummett’s daughter, Anna, the family lived in a large log house with a palmetto-thatched roof, surrounded by Bermuda grass and shaded by live oaks. The home featured claw-footed tables and family portraits, and it became the setting for lively dinners and parties. Anna recalled playing with the enslaved children and even teaching some of them to read.

This idyllic life ended abruptly with the outbreak of the Second Seminole War in 1835. For safety, Dummett moved his family to St. Augustine and conveyed the plantation to his son, Douglas, purchasing a house at the corner of St. George and St. Francis Streets, today known as the St. Francis Inn. Anna would later convert the family home into a lodging establishment.

Colonel Dummett died in St. Augustine on August 31, 1839, and was laid to rest in the city’s Huguenot Cemetery. Today, the site of the former Dummett Plantation can be found along Old Dixie Highway, about two miles north of the entrance to Tomoka State Park.

Douglas Dummett, Citrus Pioneer

Dummett’s son, Douglas, who later owned the former Dummett Plantation, was a prominent Florida planter, citrus pioneer, and politician whose innovations helped establish the Indian River citrus industry. In 1843, he represented St. Johns County in the Legislative Council of the Territory of Florida and, two years later, represented Mosquito County in the Florida House of Representatives.

Before relocating to the area of present-day Titusville, Dummett served as the first postmaster at Tomoka in Volusia County, where during the 1820s and 1830s he farmed sugarcane and, unusually for the time, also cultivated oranges. He sold his first orange crop in 1828 and later transplanted some of his trees to Merritt Island.

During the Second Seminole War, in early 1836, Dummett joined the militia company known as the Mosquito Roarers and was commissioned as a captain. He was wounded in the neck while defending a neighbor’s sugar plantation at the Battle of Dunlawton Plantation. After recovering, he married socialite Frances Hunter in 1837, the same year he was elected to the Territorial Council. His wife petitioned for a divorce in 1844.

Unsuited to life in Tallahassee, Dummett returned to the north end of Mosquito Lagoon. In 1843, he claimed a new homestead under the Armed Occupation Act near New Smyrna, where he worked as a deputy collector for the nearby port. He also began a long-term relationship with Leandra Fernandez, a young woman of mixed race, defying an 1832 Territorial Act, and together they had a son and three daughters.

After the death of his favorite child, Charles, in a hunting accident in 1860, Dummett moved his family to the remote southern end of Mosquito Lagoon in present-day Brevard County. At some point, he became aware of the wild orange trees growing near the old haulover between Mosquito Lagoon and the Indian River. Accounts differ as to whether his first shipment of 500 barrels of oranges, reported in 1828, came from these native sour trees or whether he later discovered sweet orange trees on the old Turnbull lands and began grafting their buds onto sour rootstock before 1835.

Seeking seclusion, Dummett devoted himself to nurturing his well-protected grove between the two lagoons. His early experiments with grafting, combined with the mild lagoon climate, helped his trees survive the devastating freeze of 1835 that destroyed groves across the territory. Dummett’s oranges gained a reputation for exceptional flavor and fetched a premium price of one dollar per box in New York markets. He generously shared his grafting and cultivation methods with settlers throughout the northern Indian River area and lived near his grove until he died in 1873.

By the late nineteenth century, Dummett’s pioneering techniques had spread south along the Indian River Lagoon and influenced citrus growing throughout Florida. So renowned was the region’s produce that in 1930 the Federal Trade Commission issued an order prohibiting growers outside the area from marketing their fruit as “Indian River Citrus.”

Today, little is left of the former plantation, which was burned to the ground during the Second Seminole War by a Seminole raiding party. The remaining mill ruins consist of a large, irregular wall of brick and coquina, a native limestone composed of broken shells, flanked by twin chimneys.

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