Dunlawton's Building Blocks
coquina up close
The ruins here include chimneys and other structures made of coquina, Spanish for "tiny shell." Quarried locally (and elsewhere in the Southeast), this native stone contains mollusk shell fragments and quartz sand, bound together by calcium carbonate. Centuries after the Spanish first used coquina in Florida, frontier Americans chose it for their sugar factory.
Visitors to this mill in the 1830s would have found tightly mortared blocks that looked white or pastel-colored. That's because coquina workers (likely free craftsmen and slaves) applied lime plaster to Dunlawton's structures. After Seminoles burned the Anderson plantation, this coating largely dropped off, leaving the blocks we see today.
By the 1850's, Dunlawton had a new owner and a new look. John Marshall acquired the lands in 1846, then enlarged his sugar works, adding limestone boulders (called bog rock) and slathering them with thicker mortar than the coquina masons had used. Cobbling together buildings and machines was a tradition here.
For your safety and Dunlawton's survival as a historic site, please stay off the ruins and avoid touching the coquina. Future visitors will appreciate your help, and so will Volusia County.
[ Illustration ]
A coquina quarry in Florida.
Detail from a print in Picturesque America, 1872.
[ Photos ]
Early twentieth-century snapshots of the ruins: a coquina machine base and a wall with bog rock. Builders also used brick for the sugar factory's boiler cradles, fireboxes, kettle bases, and more.
Photos courtesy of the Halifax Historical Museum, Daytona Beach
Feel free to touch this piece of cut coquina, and notice the shells that form it. Below the interpretive panel is a lime-plastered block.
These building remains and archaeological resources are listed in the National Register of Historic Places. They represent a rare surviving example of a nineteenth-century agricultural-industrial venture in Florida.
Marker is on Old Sugar Mill Road east of Herbert Street, on the left when traveling east.
Courtesy hmdb.org
