Visiting the Gamble Plantation
There is an interesting state park just north of Bradenton, FL on the Manatee River. It mostly is a former plantation built in the 1840s, abandoned in the 1850s, reoccupied by Confederate forces, used by a Confederate cabinet member to escape to Britain, abandoned again, and eventually turned into a war memorial by the Daughters of the Confederacy.
Gamble built the house after landing in the area by boat. He held many slaves and grew sugar for the New Orleans market. Then demand collapsed. Stories of his tenure suggest he was a bad guy, paranoid about slaves stealing his food, and with little concern for other than making money.
The Confederate army then used the house until the end of the Civil War.
The next inhabitant was Judah Benjamin, who served under Jefferson Davis as both Attorney General and Secretary of War. He fled from Virginia to London via the plantation, studied, and became a commercial lawyer.
Here are photos of two monuments on the property. Seeing one of them was jarring. It made me recall a southern friend being surprised some years back by a “yankee statue” in the middle of a New England town we had been visiting. These monuments are a generation newer than the ones often seen in New England.
The place is architecturally interesting and points to challenges of life in what had been a subtropical jungle. It is made of a brittle concrete with lots of seashells in it. There had been some dirt floors, but the park service filled them to protect other parts of the property. No wood in the structure is original.
You can get a good meal across the street at Popi’s. This is a Greek-leaning diner with a big menu. It caters to many palates.
The ruin of a sugar mill used to be toward the beach where Gamble landed, now across the street. My dad remembers seeing it years ago. A local told us it’s gone.