Gamble Mansion Ellenton FL

Friday morning, we packed up and drove south to Ellenton, about 30 miles from Ft DeSoto.  We had booked a 3 night stay at Ellenton Gardens, a travel resort that has mostly full time and seasonal residents, with a few sites for short term visitors.  The resort is nothing fancy, but nicely maintained, with a heated pool, large rec room, clean laundry facilities, full hook ups, including cable tv, and for $19 a night with our Passport America discount, you can't ask for much more.  We chose this park because it is close to Gamble Mansion, a historic site we wanted to see.

After the Second Seminole War, Major Robert Gamble acquired property along the Manatee River through the Armed Occupation Act which gave settlers 160 acres in exchange for a promise to live on the land for at least 5 years.  He ended up with 3450 acres in all.  Gamble began construction of the two story 10 room brick and tabby home in 1843, and completed it in 1849.  He established a sugar plantation there, but by 1856, the decline in the sugar market caused him to sell the house in 1859.  He moved to Tallahassee, and took all his furnishings with him.  The mansion eventually changed hands and later fell into disrepair until the United Daughters of the Confederacy bought the property in 1925 and deeded it to the State of Florida as a historic landmark.  The UDC designated the site The Judah P. Benjamin Confederate Memorial in as much as Benjamin, the Confederate Secretary of State, holed up in the mansion for a few days (then under a different owner than Gamble) prior to his escape from the United States at the close of the Civil War.

This is the only antebellum mansion left in South Florida. The interior furnishings are donations from other homes of the same period. The inside does not have the fancy woodwork or frills that many other plantation homes did.  Gamble was a bachelor, a working farmer, and the production of sugar and molasses was his primary concern.  He had a 40,000 gallon cistern constructed next to the house to collect rain water.  The lime from the tabby helped purify the water, thus insuring none of the staff or guests would contract dysentery from contaminated well water. Today, there are 15 acres with picnic areas among the live oaks in addition to a museum in the Visitor Center.