On August 28, 1973, the site was added to the United States National Register of Historic Places under the title of Dunlawton Plantation-Sugar Mill Ruins.

Dean established a 995-acre indigo and sugarcane plantation in what is now the Port Orange area, using the labor of enslaved Africans to cultivate and process the crops.

The brothers operated the mill with slave labor—processing sugar, molasses and rum on the property until December 1835, when the Second Seminole Indian War began.

On December 17, 1835, Gen. Joseph Hernández ordered troops to protect the plantations in the vicinity of the Matanzas, Tomoka, and Mosquito Rivers.

[10] This event is also viewed as a liberation of the enslaved workers, part of a large scale slave rebellion facilitated by Seminoles.

Florida historian Canter Brown claims that “When open warfare commenced in December 1835 and January 1836, hundreds-if not 1,000 or more-bondsmen cooperated by deserting to Indian and black settlements.” Dec. 26, 1835: Second Seminole War In 1846, Sarah Anderson sold Dunlawton to John J. Marshall, a master builder from Charleston, South Carolina, for $8,000 (~$242,720 in 2023).

He installed processing machinery bought from the destroyed Cruger and DePeyster mill in New Smyrna,[14] and with the labor of 25 slaves produced nearly 200 tons of sugar in 1851.

[2] His failure marked the effective demise of Dunlawton Plantation, and its role in the political history of East Florida ended.

This assembly is one of the earliest extant examples in the United States of the machinery required to produce sugar, molasses, and rum.

In 1948, Dr. Perry Sperber, a dermatologist practicing in Daytona Beach, leased the Dunlawton plantation property from J. Saxton Lloyd, and opened one of the first theme-parks in Florida, Bongoland, named after Bongo, a trained baboon kept in captivity there.

According to a 1991 article in the Orlando Sentinel, a Seminole family lived on the grounds for two years in a chickee, or outdoor shelter with a thatched roof and open sides.