Gamble Plantation Historic State Park preserves part of a once vast sugarcane plantation on the Manatee River centered on the antebellum Gamble Mansion, one of peninsular Florida’s most important surviving Greek Revival buildings and the region’s only surviving plantation house of its kind. Established by Major Robert E. Gamble III in 1844, the plantation grew into a 3,500-acre enterprise that depended on the forced labor of enslaved people. The site later saw Civil War use, including refuge for Judah P. Benjamin in 1865. Its surviving mansion, cistern, Patten House, and nearby sugar mill ruins reflect Florida’s plantation economy, architecture, and slavery-based expansion.