In 1830,
William Kemble contracted to build a steam-operated
sugarcane mill and a saw mill here for William DePeyster and Henry Cruger, merchant speculators from New York. Eliza Cruger, Henry Cruger's wife, and outside investors financed the construction of the mills on six hundred acres of land near New Smyrna that Cruger bought from an Episcopal minister, Ambrose Hull, who had received it as a grant from the Spanish crown during the
Second Spanish period. The land had been part of the original grant made to
Andrew Turnbull by the British during their twenty-year occupation of Florida. On December 25, 1835, a band of Seminole Indians pillaged the plantation, after the overseer John Dwight Sheldon, his family, and resident slaves fled to the mainland across the
Halifax River. That night the Indians set the sugar mill and other buildings afire. Afterwards, the machinery from the sugar mill was removed and installed at the
Dunlawton Sugar Mill. Before coming under the administration of the Florida Park Service as a historic site, the property was commonly believed to be the (non-existent) ruins of the Mission of Atocuimi, a Spanish mission for the
Timucua Indians; this false assertion is still propagated by misinformed persons. ==References==