The First Settlement
Enterprise, on Cornelius Taylor’s grant, included the shell midden, Green Springs (left), and two other springs. Taylor built a “pleasant and commodious” inn for steamboat clientele on top of the Enterprise shell mound. Sugar cane and cotton were grown on the plantation which had outbuildings, slave quarters, a saw mill, sugar boiler, and orange grove.

Live Oak Harvesting

The quest for live oak to supply the Navy had resulted in the wholesale decimation of the timber resources throughout the Southeast as far back as the early 1800s, alarming Congress into passing a law in 1822 to protect remaining stands of timber on public land.

Taylor had started out as a U.S. Timber Agent, commissioned to prevent contractors and individuals from cutting stands of trees on public land and angering many of them in the process. With the advent of a new administration in Tallahassee, Taylor was replaced by another agent and quickly changed his position to demand that settlers be allowed to harvest their timber and sell it to private contractors. They did until a directive came down from the federal government saying that only the timber necessary for construction and cultivation could be cut. This resulted in financial hardship for many of the settlers.

Live oak, highly prized by the Navy for shipbuilding, was the main attraction of the area for the early settlers. Taylor argued before Congress that the colonists of Enterprise and other areas should have the right to sell timber from their land to support themselves until their crops could come in. The Palmer and Ferris Company bought much of the timber from land grant owners. At right is the old oak tree (no longer standing) on the lakefront near the Brock House.

Settlement Problems

Under the Armed Occupation Act, the government induced settlers to venture into the wilderness and establish homesteads, promising rations, ammunition, and troop protection for at least a year. However, after only a month or two, the government reneged, cutting off food, supplies, and troops. An outraged Taylor wrote a lengthy letter to a St. Augustine newspaper complaining that the government had left them to the mercy of the Indians like sitting ducks. Many of the settlers at Enterprise and Ft. Mellon headed back to whence they came. But some, like the Taylors, their relatives by marriage the Houstons, the Bakers, Simpsons, Rileys, Demasters, and others stayed on to establish prosperous homesteads around the lake.

Not long after the Taylor’s arrival, tragedy struck the family when Taylor’s oldest daughter “Polly” (Mary Arabella) died in September of 1842 in an epidemic now thought to have been smallpox which also took the lives of nine slaves. But the family persevered, planting oranges, sugar cane, and cotton and attracting tourists to their mineral springs. One visitor impressed by the improvements made by all the families around the lake declared in 1843 that Enterprise “is destined one day to become one of the most important inland towns in the Territory.”

Comments or Questions?
Email the

VolusiaHistory.com is a partnership between the
Volusia County Historic Preservation Board
and the Volusia County Government