The Judah P. Benjamin Confederate Memorial at Gamble Plantation Historic State Park, also known as the Gamble Mansion or Gamble Plantation, is a Florida State Park, located in Ellenton, Florida, on 37th Avenue East and US 301. It is home to the Florida Division United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC).
The park consists of the antebellum mansion developed by its first owner, Major Robert Gamble; a 40,000-gallon cistern to provide the household with fresh water; and of the former sugarcane plantation. At its peak, the forced-labor farm included 3,500 acres, and Gamble likely enslaved more than 200 people to work the property and process the sugarcane.
The mansion was listed on the National Register of Historic Places as the Robert Gamble House on August 12, 1970. Its columns and two-foot-thick walls are constructed of tabby, a regional material developed as a substitute for brick.
The park also includes the restored wood-frame, two-story, Victorian-style Patten House, built in 1872 for owner George Patten.
In 1925, the mansion and grounds were purchased by the United Daughters of the Confederacy and donated to the state as a memorial to Judah P. Benjamin, who served in three Cabinet positions under Confederate President Jefferson Davis during the American Civil War. He stayed at the plantation in May 1865, before fleeing from the Union forces and sailing to England, where he had a second career.
The Gamble Mansion serves as home to the Florida Division UDC. In 1937, the UDC installed a memorial plaque to Benjamin at the mansion. Also on the grounds is the Confederate Veterans Memorial Monument, erected October 10, 1937.
In 2002, the State of Florida acquired the property that holds the ruins of the plantation's sugar mill, one of the South's largest, and added it to the historic park complex.
On April 18, 2012, the AIA's Florida Chapter placed the Gamble Mansion #76 on its list, Florida Architecture: 100 Years. 100 Places.
History
The coastal area was inhabited for thousands of years by varying cultures of indigenous peoples, who left huge shell middens as evidence of their reliance on seafood. Historic tribes in this area included the Tocobaga, Creek, Yamasee, and Seminole. (The Creek and Seminole were relative latecomers, after their lands farther north were taken by White settlers.)
At the close of the Seminole War in 1842, the United States opened the Florida frontier to settlement by European Americans. Major Robert Gamble Jr. (b. 1813 in Virginia), who had served in the war, received 160 acres for homesteading, and arrived at the Manatee River site in 1844. Other sugar planters from South Carolina and established slave states soon joined him along the rich Manatee River valley on the western coast of today's central Florida. The sugar planters enslaved many people to clear the lands; plant, harvest and process sugarcane; and build the plantation houses, mills, and outbuildings. By 1845, a dozen plantations along the riverfront were producing for the New Orleans market. The planters shipped their commodity crops downriver and across the Gulf of Mexico to the international port.
The Gamble Mansion was built principally by enslaved people, both laborers and artisans, using local materials over the course of five to six years. The mansion is an outstanding example of antebellum construction in the Doric Revivalist vernacular architectural style. The mansion's columns and two-foot-thick walls are made of tabby, a unique type of concrete first used by Spanish and English settlers on the Atlantic coast and Sea Islands as an alternative to clay bricks, which could not be produced due to a lack of clay in the coastal soil. Techniques for making tabby were brought to Florida by European-American planters and the African-American people they enslaved. The workers created the material by mixing lime (extracted by burning crushed oyster shells), more crushed oyster shells, sand, and water. The mixture was poured into molds for hardening, and the finished product was used in the same manner as bricks. Ample supplies of oyster shells were found in middens present on the sites of former Native American coastal villages.
Next to the house is a covered, 40,000-gallon cistern with a wood-shake roof, which Gamble had built to supply the household's fresh water needs. Fish were kept in the cistern to eat insects and help keep the water clean.