The Tampa Times from Tampa, Florida • 10

1 MftL The Tampa Times Tuesday, November 3, 1981 Section Seashells and molasses preserve the Old South Mil mil l. ill wim.inijpp ui.i.y n. mill, i v. "fiJ i i a i i i i 1 1 v' 1 i 1 y' i ft 4 it' By JO WERNE Knlght-Ridder News Service ELLENTON The graceful house of pillars stands on a well-tended lawn, a pristine beauty that has survived bankruptcy, neglect, hurricanes and more than 130 years in a humid, sub-tropical climate. It is the Gamble plantation, the only antebellum structure remaining in southern Florida.

Slaves labored six years to build it of a curious material made of seashells and molasses. Once a ruin, it is now listed in the National Register of Historic Buildings and the National Register of Historic Places. A blood-red flag with a St. Andrew's cross of blue flutters from a flag pole, marking it also as the Judah P. Benjamin Confederate Memorial, in honor of the Confederate secretary of state who took refuge there in March 1865 while fleeing the Union Army after Lee's surrender.

The house would not be standing today if it weren't for the Judah P. Benjamin Chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. The UDC paid $3,000 for the badly deteriorating hulk in 1923 and deeded it to Florida, which land, planting cane, building a sugar mill and starting the beautiful Greek Revival mansion overlooking the river. Who designed the mansion? It has been attributed to Benjamin Latrobe, a leading advocate of Greek Revival architecture in 19th century America and the man who designed the Gamble family home in Richmond. But no one knows for sure; the family's papers were destroyed in a fire in Tallahassee.

Construction began in 1844-45 with an odd two-story blockhouse that would be' home to Gamble until the main house was completed. It had two rooms on the second floor, a kitchen and living area on the first floor. There were no stairs between the floors, merely a trap door in the ceiling through which a rope ladder was dropped for access to the second-floor bedrooms. At night, the ladder would be pulled up and the trap door secured. This provided safety from wild animals and unfriendly Indians.

Construction of the main house took six years and millions of oyster shells, burned, crushed and mixed with sand and molasses to create a concrete-like material called tabby. Burning the oyster shells created lime that helped to harden the mixture. The gooey tabby was poured into wood boxes to make bricks and into cylindrical frames to make the column sections. After drying in the sun, the tabby sections were cut into four pie-shaped wedges. Wedges were stacked, four per layer, until they formed 18-foot columns.

The pillars are 26 inches' in diameter, with no internal support, although the wedges were layered so that seams alternated. The pillars then were plastered with a smooth tabby made by using fewer and more finely ground shells. A strong building material, tabby is more porous than brick and thus absorbs moisture, which tends to keep it "alive" and less likely to dry and crumble. The pillars have been repaired from time to time, as a bulge at the base of one of them indicates. Only one pillar, crumbled along with the second-floor veranda by a hurricane in 1926, has been completely replaced.

The replacement is concrete, textured to look like tabby. The hurricane also weakened the original old blockhouse structure, now at the back of the mansion. It had to be shored up with concrete buttresses. See SEASHELLS, page 4B designated it a historic site. Since 1925, when the state provided an initial $10,000 toward restoration, funds have been raised by the UDC and allocated by the State Legislature to restore, furnish and maintain the mansion.

The restoration has been done with sensitivity, to show what pioneer plantation life was like in South Florida. The rooms are simply furnished with things that are in keeping with the history of the house. Thus, there are no carved marble fireplaces or silk draperies such as graced the more prosperous Southern plantation homes during the 1840s. The house was built by Maj. Robert Gamble, who came to Manatee County in 1844 from Leon County in hopes of recouping family losses suffered in the depression following the panic of 1837.

His father, John Gratton Gamble, originally from Richmond, was a tobacco farmer and banker who thought the family might prosper through sugar. Young Gamble, a bachelor in his late r20s or early 30s, started his plantation on the Manatee River with a 160-acre homestead grant. He eventually acquired 3,500 acres, of Which 1,500 acres were devoted to sugar cane. Gamble brought down family slaves from Tallahassee and set them to work clearing the The Gamble mansion in Ellenton is the only antebellum structure remaining in southern Florida. Confederate leader added some notoriety to the Gamble mansion By JO WERNE The old plantation is not hard to find The Judah P.

Benjamin Confederate Memorial at Gamble Plantation is in Ellenton on Route 301 just north of Bradenton, in Manatee County on Florida's Gulf coast. The site is open daily from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Entrance to the mansion is by tour only. Tours of the house begin on the hour from 9 a.m.

to 4 p.m. Admission price is 50 cents for children and adults. The money goes into the state's general fund for support and restoration of the mansion. Tours are conducted by rangers of the Division of Recreation and Parks, Florida Department of Natural Resources. In addition to the Gamble Mansion, tours of the Patten House on the site can be arranged through the Judah P.

Benjamin Chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC). The house contains antique furniture, toys and fashions dating from the 19th and early 20th centuries. Visitors can picnic at tables arranged under shade trees behind Gamble Mansion. For information, write or phone Judah P. Benjamin Confederate Memorial at Gamble Plantation State Historic Site, Ellenton 33532.

to the bar in 1832 and married a Creole, Natalie St. Martin, the same year. By 1852, he was a U.S. senator, but left the Senate in 1861 to become attorney general of the Confederate States of America. He then became secretary of war and, in 1862, secretary of state.

At Civil War's end, escape from the Federals was nothing short of a miracle," wrote Col. Thomas Spencer in The Southern Israelite magazine in 1939. With a $50,000 "dead or alive" price on his head, Benjamin burned his correspondence and other papers and fled the ruined South. He found temporary haven at the Gamble Plantation, then sailed to Marathon in the Florida Keys, then to Nassau in the Bahamas, and finally to England. In England, Benjamin was admitted to the bar and became counsel to Queen Victoria.

When he retired, Benjamin and his wife moved to Paris where he suffered a serious injury while jumping off a tram car. He died on May 6, 1884. Knight-Ridder News Service ELLENTON Judah P. Benjamin, sometimes called by historians, "the best mind in the South," had a brilliant career before and after he sought refuge at the Gamble plantation in 1865. He began life poor, was an immigrant, became a prominent lawyer, served in the U.S.

Senate, tossed in his fortune with the Confederacy in 1861 and ended his career in England as a counsel to Queen Victoria. Benjamin was born in St. Thomas, Virgin Islands, on Aug. 6, 1811. His parents were Sephardic Jews who had migrated there from England.

When Judah was a youngster, his family moved to Charleston, S.C. When he was just 14, Benjamin entered Yale College (later university) as the prodigy of a wealthy businessman who took a liking to him. Benjamin left Yale without graduating at age 17 and struck out for Louisiana where he continued his study of law. He was admitted i Judah P. Benjamin found the Gamble mansion a suitable hideout bruTA Charlie Robins LL i me, because that's no time to be standing around a drugstore cooling your heels, waiting to get a prescription filled.

Until now, I didn't know that anyone had developed a pill to protect people from this sort of thing. I always assumed that if your friendly neighborhood nuclear power plant started going "plop, plop, fizz, fizz," even Al-ka-Seltzer wouldn't relieve that ache-all-over feeling. I'm sure this news will enble the folks who live around the Sequoyah plant to rest easier at night, knowing that those pills are in the medicine cabinet. However, if I lived within a five-mile radius of a nuclear facility, it might take more than a bottle of potassium iodide tablets to make me feel secure. At the very least, I would insist on being issued a basic nuclear emergency medical kit, containing the following items: Take the nuclear power industry, for example.

Yesterday, I read that the state of Tennessee plans to distribute pills to about 7,000 families who live near a nuclear plant north of Chattanooga, to protect them in case of an accident. According to an Associated Press report, free potassium iodide tablets will be given to all those living within a five-mile radius of the Tennessee Valley Authority's Sequoyah nuclear plant. The pills are intended to protect residents who might inhale radioactive iodine released into the air during an accident, by keeping the substance from being absorbed in the thyroid glands, where it could eventually cause cancer or other serious side effects of progress. "The whole reason for pre-distribution is that, in the process of evacuation, you would already have some protection," a state health official said. get the child-proof cap off the bottle of potassium iodide pills.

A bottle of Kaopectate, to prevent any accidents other than the one at the nuclear plant. A flashlight, so I could see the directions on the pill bottles. After all, it's quite possible that the power might go out, and my own glow wouldn't be quite bright enough to read by. A 20-cent stamp, because I would definitely want to fire off a nasty letter to somebody about what happened. (This is subject to change, of course, as there's a good chance postage rates will go up several times before the nuclear power plant does.) Finally, a good evacuation map showing the most direct route to Memphis.

In the event of a nuclear accident, I figure nobody other than Elvis' doctor would have the right kind of pills in his bag to make me feel better about the whple thing. 4 How do you spell relief? Valium or some other tranquilizer, to It's comforting to know that modern technology has not lost sight of the human factor, i and alway keeps our best interest at heart. it- That certainly sounds reasohable'enoUgh td V. keep my hands from shaking Jong enough to $1, 1.