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Kingsley Plantation
The Kingsley Plantation or the
Zephaniah Kingsley Plantation Home and Buildings was the former
estate located near Jacksonville, Florida, and named after one of
its first owners, who lived here for 25 years. It is situated at the
northern end of Fort George Island by Fort George Inlet and is now
part of the Timucuan Ecological and Historic Preserve that is taken
care of by the National Park Service. It originally held a 1000
acres; although most of it has returned to nature, with the main
house and outbuildings sitting on 60 acres. There was evidence of a
pre-Columbian Timucua existence, as well as the remains of a Spanish
mission called San Juan del Puerto. It was under British rule in
1765, and the plantation that began here had many owners while the
state was given back to Spain and then back to the United States.
Kingsley was the longest owner, and his family was a polygamous and
interracial one that was controlled by and resistant to the
important issues of slavery and race. Before being transferred to
the state in 1955, freed slaves and numerous private owners lived
there. The Park Service took it over in 1991, with the most
important items being the owner's house, a marvelous structure that
was built between 1797 and 1798, an attached kitchen house, barn and
remnants of 25 anthropologically important slave cabins that were
preserved after the Civil War. The foundations of the house,
kitchen, barn and slave quarters had been made of cement tabby,
which enabled the buildings to survive so many years. Tabby is
made of lime, sand, crushed oyster shells and water, used during
colonial times because of the lack of clay that could be used for
bricks. It is a very durable substance that is still standing today.
The sites around the slave quarters has been a valuable
archeological find, that has allowed researchers to get a better
understanding of the life and traditions of these early people that
had just arrived in this country, and put into a life of misery and
misunderstandings. Kingsley was born in England, educated in
London and moved to South Carolina with his family; and then
becoming a slave trader and shipping potentate, thus giving him the
perfect opportunity to travel. He came to Fort George Island in
1814, leasing it, and finally purchasing it in 1817. He owned
numerous plantations near the lower St. John's River, near what it
today the city of Jacksonville, as well as Drayton Island in central
Florida; two of these would be run by his wife, part-time, former
slave Anna Jai, whom he had bought in Cuba when she was 13. He freed
her in 1811, as well as the three children they had together.
Although a slave trader, he was extremely protective of his family,
which eventually included three more former slave women. After much
study, he was described as a man of complex paradoxes, both proud of
his success as a slaveholder, and devoted to his family. He
published a defense of the tradition in 1828, stating it was a
needed condition, beneficial to owner and slave and the economy. He
was appointed by President James Monroe to the Florida's Territorial
Council in 1823, where Kingsley attempted to get the rights of free
people under Spanish control to be defined by the council, but after
seeing they wouldn't, he resigned. This council then passed laws
that forbade the interracial marriages, as well as the rights of
free blacks or mixed race children from owning land. Kingsley then
sent his wives, children and some slaves to Haiti, which had become
a free black republic. He sold his plantation to nephew Kingsley
Beatty Gibbs in 1839, and moved many of his slaves to the Haiti
plantation, which became indentured servants since slavery was not
allowed. He passed on in 1843, and Anna came back to Florida in 1846
to settle an inheritance dispute with some of Kingsley white
relatives, but won the case and his holdings in the state became
hers and her children. Gibbs sold the Fort George Island plantation
in 1852, and moved to St. Augustine. The island was then
passed and purchased by many different people, as the years went by,
until 1955, when the Florida Park Service acquired the majority of
it and called it the Kingsley Plantation State Historic Site.
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