Yulee Sugar Mill Ruins Historic State Park

These ruins of an ante-bellum Florida Plantation & Sugar Mill were part of a 5,000 acre Sugar Plantation hacked out of the hammock along the Homosassa River by roughly a thousand slaves in 1851. The Plantation, of which the Mill was the centerpiece, helped provide sugar for Confederate soldiers during the American Civil War. The Mill was abandoned in 1864 when Union forces came up the Homosassa River, torched the home of Plantation owner David Yulee, and freed the Plantation's labor force under the terms of the Emancipation Proclamation.