Kingsley Plantation in Duval County, Florida

Photograph: TEHP Kingsley Plantation slave bldgs pano01.jpg by Ebyabe · CC BY-SA 3.0 · Restored from the credited Wikimedia Commons file, normalized to the consistent attraction-card frame and converted to WebP by 1stFlorida.com. Portrait originals retain their complete composition over a softly blurred extension of the same photograph.

Duval County attraction

Kingsley Plantation

Duval County · North Florida & First Coast

Florida's oldest standing plantation house, on Fort George Island, with the tabby slave cabins still arranged in their long arc.

ABOUT THIS PLACE

The house at Kingsley Plantation was built by enslaved people in 1798 and is the oldest plantation house left standing in Florida. It faces the Fort George River, and its many angles and windows were set to pull air through the rooms. Zephaniah Kingsley moved in during 1814 with his wife Anna Madgigine Jai. He had bought her as a slave in Cuba in 1806 and legally freed her and their children in 1811; she went on to run the farm with him and to own land and enslaved people in her own right. The place grew Sea Island cotton along with tobacco, sugar cane, corn and indigo, all of it moved out by schooner and barge on the river. When Kingsley left for Haiti in the 1830s he gave fifty of the people he held their legal freedom. The slave cabins are what stay with visitors. They stand in a long semicircle, an arrangement like that of many African villages, each cabin two rooms, one with a fireplace for cooking and heat and one for sleeping. One has been restored and the ruins of the others are still there. The National Park Service keeps the house, kitchen, barn, garden, waterfront and cabins as part of the Timucuan preserve. It is open daily from 9 to 5 and there is no charge

GETTING THERE

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