During Florida's British Period from 1763 to 1783, the small trading hamlet of Mills Ferry was established here on the St. Marys River, where William Bartram first chronicled in the early 1770s the Seagrove & Co. trading post at the crossing of the British King's Road connecting Charleston, South Carolina, with St. Augustine, Florida. In the mid-1770s, the British built Fort Tonyn one mile east to help keep the Georgia militia from invading Florida, and longleaf yellow pine cut along the St. Marys River supplied masts for British Navy tall ships. During Florida's Second Spanish Period from 1783 to 1821, the crossing was known as Whitehouse, or Casa Blanca, and Drummond's Ferry before becoming King's Ferry in the mid-1820s. Among the first Spanish land grant owners between 1790 and 1805 were Zachariah Haddock, William Drummond, and William Nelson, and other families included Higginbotham, Braddock, Vanzant, McKendree, Libby, Davis, Albertie, and King. In the decades after Spain relinquished Florida in 1821, Protestant congregations including Ephesus and nearby Mt. Olive Baptist Churches organized here, and in the early 1850s brothers Gilbert and Franklin Germond and their father built and operated a mill with African-Americans making up the bulk of the labor force. After 1865, many African-Americans remained in the area, working in the mills, in the forests, and on the docks loading four- and five-masted ships with lumber bound around the world; family names included Thompson, Taylor, Cooper, Timmons, Albertie, and Scipio. In 1870, William and Jackson Mizell arrived and expanded Germond's Little Mill into the largest milling operation in Nassau County, and in the late 1870s Hilliard and Bailey built another mill beside it and a log tram south to what would become the Town of Hilliard. In the 1890s, Kings Ferry reached its peak with a post office, millinery shop, Masonic Lodge, schoolhouse, churches, skating rink, blacksmith shop, newspaper, and many drinking establishments, but by the 1920s its economic activity had waned, leaving only memories, a scattering of private homes, and the two-story T.W. Russell house built in 1875 east of this site.