Living on the Edge

Life at the Dunlawton sugar plantation was marked by isolation and uncertainty. When owner John Marshall sought help against the Seminoles, an army commander in St. Augustine offered muskets but warned that the inhabitants' best reliance should be upon their own efforts. Even so, the Marshalls faced repeated setbacks: hired workers strained accommodations and tempers, the plantation's supply ship grounded and broke up in Mosquito Inlet, and cane crops remained poor enough that by 1851 one Marshall son doubted the family could produce enough sugar even for home use. Maria Marshall, burdened by endless factory repairs, workers in her house, concern for her children's education, and the failing crops, hoped a visiting relative might buy Dunlawton so the family could leave Florida, but that did not happen. On November 20, 1852, she died in childbirth at Dunlawton, far from the settled South Carolina community of her youth. Tradition later held, without proof, that her son Benjamin Marshall returned from Louisiana decades afterward to help sell the old plantation, and although she was probably buried at Dunlawton with twins who died at birth, her surviving family's new home became Louisiana's Red River country.

Port Orange, Florida · United States