Soon after 1825, John Houston McIntosh built a tabby sugar works at New Canaan Plantation, where in his sugar house he installed what Thomas Spalding called the first horizontal cane mill worked by cattle power. McIntosh, born in 1773 in what is now McIntosh County, settled in East Florida as a young man and became a leader of a group of American citizens who, during the War of 1812, plotted the annexation of East Florida to the United States. After the Spanish government crushed this plot, McIntosh moved to Georgia and acquired two plantations in Camden County, Marianna, where he built a home, and New Canaan, where he began cultivating sugar cane under the influence of Thomas Spalding, who had experimented in sugar production and had seen steam-propelled horizontal cane mills in Louisiana. After McIntosh’s death in 1836, New Canaan was sold to Col. Hallowes, who renamed the plantation Bollingbrook and lived there until after the Civil War. During the war, Hallowes planted cane and made sugar in the McIntosh sugar house, and he also used the tabby sugar works as a starch factory, producing arrowroot starch in large quantities.