Native Stone

Native Stone. The Cruger-dePester Sugar Mill. , The mill ruins here are made of coquina, Spanish for “tiny shell.” Quarried locally (and elsewhere in Southeast), it contains mollusk shell fragments and quartz sand, bound together by calcium carbonate. Centuries after the Spanish first used coquina in Florida, frontier Americans chose this building for their sugar factory., Durable as it looks , cut coquina is porous and surprisingly delicate. Today’s earthtone blocks are attractive, but in the 1830’s this mill had protective coatings of white lime plaster. Its roof sheltered valuable machinery from the West Point Foundry of New York, a pioneering industrial manufacturer in the United States., Following the Seminoles’ 1835 raid, these ruins faced years of rugged weather, destructive vegetation, climbing visitors, and misguided masonry patching. Finally, in 2007, preservation specialists properly repaired and stabilized the old coquina walls. Even so, the site remains sensitive to human disturbance., What happened to the sugar factory’s own white coating? Fires set by the Seminoles probably caused the plaster to fall off, though artist John Rogers Vinton still found some of the light areas to show in his early painting of the ruins.