By Kathie Stamps
From tourists to neighbors and historians to artists, people have visited the Gamble Plantation in Ellenton for 100 years.
In 1925, the United Daughters of the Confederacy deeded the Gamble Plantation over to the state of Florida as a historic site. The property was more than 80 years old by that point and had changed hands several times since its origin. It dates back to 1843, when Major Robert Gamble Jr. built a sugar mill on the land near the Manatee River. Manatee County would officially form in 1855.
Between 1845 and 1850 Major Gamble built a two-story mansion. He would acquire 3,450 acres before selling the property in 1856. According to a marker on the grounds, the mansion was “rescued from decay in 1923 by the Judah P. Benjamin chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy.” And yes, enslaved people constructed the plantation house and worked the sugarcane fields.
While at Gamble Plantation, be sure to see the displays in the museum.
This marker stands just down the road from the mansion at the Gamble Sugar Cane Mill site—a reminder of the vast sugar plantation once operated by Major Robert Gamble.
By 1850, this site housed one of the best sugar processing mills in the South.
These markers help us remember not just names and dates, but the full stories—complex, powerful and essential to understanding our shared history.
“People are very conscious that it was a place that slaves worked and lived. We talk about what all they did. We don’t ignore them,” said Gail Jessee, president of Gamble Plantation Preservation Alliance.
“That was a working plantation, and you [had] to have people to work it.
“That was a way of life. None of us think it was a good thing. We can’t go back and change the past.”
A water channel on the east side of the mansion was excavated by enslaved people. “We’ve been working to get a historical marker placed there to show that it still runs down to Manatee River and is still functional,” Jessee said.
Gamble Plantation Historic State Park is one of 175 state parks within the Division of Recreation and Parks, which is one of 33 divisions of the Department of Environmental Protection. The DEP is one of 25 governmental agencies of the State of Florida. Each state park has a CSO, citizen support organization, to support the individual park with fundraising and preservation and to work collaboratively with the state.
GPPA, Gamble Plantation Preservation Alliance, Inc., is an all-volunteer organization, formally established in the spring of 2000.
GPPA membership is open to students, individuals, families, organizations and corporations.
Jessee has been a volunteer at Gamble Plantation Historic State Park since 1971. “I’ve been interested in history and got interested in the War Between the States, and since that falls within the time frame, I went down and was volunteering as a docent, giving tours.” She has seen big tour buses and people from all over the world coming into Florida for tourism and making the Gamble Plantation a stop on their itineraries.
Today, there are 15 acres of maintained park grounds and picnic areas.
The park itself is open every day of the year from 8 a.m. to sunset.
Gamble Plantation sits on sixteen acres, which include the mansion, the Patten House, a museum, an archives building and smokehouse ruins.
Locals and visitors can enjoy a respite from a busy workday by walking among the outdoor structures and antebellum architecture, reading the markers and memorials throughout the property, resting a spell on an occasional bench, enjoying shade from a southern Oak tree and, of course, getting plenty of fresh air. Inside, guided tours of the mansion are offered six times a day, Thursday through Monday. The visitor center and museum are also open Thursday through Monday.
“Art in the Park” comes to Gamble the weekend of March 7-8 (10 a.m. to 5 p.m.), featuring the work of dozens of artists, as does the semiannual Bill Mergens Memorial Car & Truck Show on April 12 (10 a.m. to 2 p.m.).
“It keeps part of American history alive, in that you can come and see what a house looked like in the 1850s,” Jessee said of Gamble Plantation. “And we all need to know our history. If we don’t appreciate our history to see what mistakes we made in the past, we’re going to repeat them in the future.”
For more information about Gamble Plantation Historic State Park, call 941-723-4536 or visit www.gambleplantation.org/.