 In 1830, William Kemble contracted to build a steam-operated sugarcane mill and a saw mill here for William DePeyster and Henry Cruger, merchant speculators from New York.Eliza Cruger, Henry Cruger's wife, and outside investors financed the construction of the mills on six hundred acres of land near New Smyrna that Cruger bought from an Episcopal minister, Ambrose Hull, who had received it as a grant from the Spanish crown during the Second Spanish period.The land had been part of the original grant made to Andrew Turnbull by the British during their twenty-year occupation of Florida.