Welcome to the site and ruins of Bulowville. The plantation was originally purchased by Charles Wilhelm Bulow and began to develop in 1821. Unfortunately, not much is left today after the Seminole Indians burned the plantation at the beginning of the Second Seminole War. But between 1823 and 1836 Bulowville was one of the largest sugar plantations in East Florida. 

Sugar planting and milling really took off in East Florida after the United States of America obtained Florida as a territory in 1821. People hoped that Florida could produce sugar for the United states like our neighbor, Louisiana. Of some 12 sugar plantations stretching from St. Augustine to Cape Canaveral during this period. Bulowvile was one of the largest and wealthiest. 1,000 acres of the 6,675-acre plantation were planted in sugar cane.

Running a successful sugar plantation required a lot of energy. Before the 1800s, sugar mills were largely operated by animal power. Horses or oxen turned the gears that moved the large rollers used to crush cane. By the time this sugar mill was built in 1831, steam-powered mills were available. These provided greater power and allowed cane to be processed faster.

This building housed the engine that produced the steam power for the sugar mill. A pipe carried steam from this building to the second floor of the sugar house where the large three-roller cane press was located. You can see the sugar house just beyond this building. When the sugar mill was not operating, the steam from the boiler house powered the plantation saw mill.

Along with sugar cane, cotton, corn and rice had also once been grown here on the plantation in addition to vegetables for personal use. Livestock or game provided meat for the families here. To preserve food, the meats were cured and kept cool in spring houses. Cool water from the spring helped keep items in the spring house from spoiling.

Slaves on the plantation would not typically have access to these spring houses to preserve their food. In addition to staples provided such as cornmeal, they ate vegetables from their garden plots, small game they were able to hunt and kill or fish they caught. 

It is possible that the buildings in the background of this drawing, The "Greater Yellow Legs," (original name: "Tell-Tale Godwit, or Snipe") by naturalist John James Audubon, are only contemporary images of Bulowville that exist. Audubon visited Bulow in the winter of 1831 and recalls, among other things, the anticipation of "a good dinner" under Bulow's "comfortable roof." The modern screen pavilion now sits directly across from Bulow Creek, behind the bird on the left in this drawing. 

In addition to food that was hunted for, East Florida plantation owners also traded with the Seminole Indians for cattle and hogs. In return they were given blankets, fabric and beads as well as black powder and lead.

Getting sugar out of the sugar cane was difficult work. Not only did slaves have to cut the cane exactly when it was mature, they had to crush it and boil the juice as soon as possible in order to get the most and best sugar out of the crop. During sugar-making season, everyone worked around the clock to make sure the job was done right.

Here at the sugar house, slaves placed cut cane on a conveyor belt that carried the stalks to the rollers to be crushed. Cane juice was gravity fed into classifiers and then into a series of kettles heated by a furnace under the smallest kettle, the batterie. This system was called the "Jamaica Train." Slaves ladled boiling juice from kettle to kettle unit it finally granulated in the batterie. Then they "struck" the juice and removed it into the vats to cool.

After granulating and cooling in the sugar house, the sugar was still not ready to ship out. Although it was granulated, the sugar was still wet with molasses. Slaves scored and spaded this cooled sugar into hogsheads, or large barrels, located in the two curing rooms on either side of the loading area. These hogsheads could hold about 1,000 pounds of sugar.

In the warm curing rooms, slaves placed the hogsheads on board over cisterns. Open joints in the barrels and tubes made of cane, fixed into the hogsheads, allowed the molasses to drain out of the barrels and into the containers below - a process that took about 30 days. Once the molasses drained from the sugar, slaves filled the hogsheads up with more sugar and they were ready to ship. Some plantations such as Dummett had their own distilleries to make rum from molasses, but these ones did not.

In 1836, following the destruction of the Bulow Plantation, it was estimated that the crops for that year would have been worth at least $20,000 (approximately $715,000 as of 2024).

The last step in producing sugar on the Bulow Plantation involved getting it ready to ship north to market. Once the molasses drained from the hogsheads in the curing room, slaves transferred both the sugar and the molasses to this loading area between the two curing rooms to wait for their journey by wagon to Bulow Creek.

If you walk or drive back toward the plantation house, you may notice some spaces carved out in the creek bank to your right as you look over Bulow Creek. These boat slips held the flats that eventually carried my sugar and molasses down to the creek to the Halifax River and on to Mosquito Inlet (now Ponce de Leon Inlet) where workers loaded them onto boats bound for Jacksonville, St. Augustine, and Savannah.

In December 1835, the Second Seminole War broke out between the Seminole Nation and United States troops. The Bulow's Seminole neighbors were resisting removal to reservations out West in present-day Oklahoma,. On December 28th, Major Benjamin Putnam and his troops occupied Bulowville against the Bulow family's wishes and remained until late January 1836. Shortly after the troops left, the plantation was burned presumably by Seminole tribes.