The Dudley family established its Alachua County farm before the American Civil War, in a north Florida landscape opened to expanding cotton agriculture after the displacement of Seminole peoples. Phelston and Mary Dudley moved to the area in the 1850s and built a working plantation. Enslaved African Americans supplied essential labor in fields, households, livestock care, construction, and processing, making slavery central to the farm’s early economy.

The Civil War and emancipation ended legal slavery but did not end unequal labor relations. The Dudleys rebuilt production with family members, hired workers, tenants, and sharecroppers in a region where debt and segregation constrained Black freedom. Cotton remained important, but farmers diversified in response to depleted soil, pests, prices, and changing transportation. Corn, cane, vegetables, livestock, and timber products contributed to household survival and market income.

Successive Dudley generations expanded the farmstead into a complex of house, kitchen, barns, smokehouse, cane-processing equipment, fences, fields, gardens, and animal enclosures. Daily life depended on seasonal labor and practical knowledge: preserving food, making syrup, repairing tools, managing livestock, and coordinating planting and harvest. The property adopted selected machinery and commercial crops while retaining older techniques, illustrating gradual rather than sudden agricultural modernization.

By the twentieth century, north Florida agriculture was changing through mechanization, improved roads, refrigeration, wage labor, and competition from larger operations. The Dudley family continued farming, cattle raising, and other activities while much of the surrounding rural landscape was subdivided or altered. Myrtle Dudley, the last family member to manage the property, preserved buildings, furnishings, documents, tools, and the accumulated arrangement of a century-old farm.

The state acquired the property in the early 1980s and developed it as a historic state park. Preservation includes living crops, heritage livestock, fences, outbuildings, and demonstrations as well as the main house. Interpretation increasingly addresses enslaved labor and post-emancipation workers alongside the Dudley family. The farm is significant because it preserves an unusually complete agricultural landscape showing continuity and change from plantation slavery through tenancy, diversification, mechanization, and the decline of the traditional family farm. The preserved landscape also allows historians to compare the written record with material evidence. Family papers, tools, building changes, plantings, and oral histories reveal which stories were saved and which laborers were left unnamed. Continued research into enslaved people, tenants, neighbors, and workers is necessary to present the farm as a shared and unequal workplace rather than solely a family residence. The park’s fields and animals keep that agricultural knowledge visible.