In the nineteenth century, people at this plantation tried to make sugar while facing isolation, hurricanes, and the dispossession of Seminoles; some lost money and others lost more. Its familiar name, blending Dunn and Lawton, arose in the 1830s, but the story began in 1804, when Patrick Dean, an immigrant from the Bahamas, received a 995-acre land grant on the west side of the Halifax River. Dean produced cotton and sugar, but the War of 1812 disrupted his operations, and he died violently in 1818, possibly at the hands of an Indian. The ruins are associated with later owners, especially the Andersons in the 1830s and the Marshalls in the following decades. Sarah P. Anderson and her sons, who came from the Tomoka River country, acquired the plantation in 1832 and added coquina works, machinery, and outbuildings, but Seminole raiders soon burned that investment. In the 1840s, South Carolinian John J. Marshall arrived with his skeptical wife and her brother, expanded the factory, bought more equipment, and began making sugar with mixed success. That family venture ended in tragedy, and after her brother's cane crop failed in 1851, Maria Hawes Marshall remarked that events were turning out like all the rest of his great expectations. Soon the Marshalls were gone, and the old sugar house began evolving into a community gathering point and Florida curiosity rather than a working sugar plantation.