Chinsegut Hill Historic Site in Hernando County, Florida

Photograph: Chinsegut Hill Manor House02.jpg by Ebyabe · CC BY 2.5 · 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.

Hernando County attraction

Chinsegut Hill Historic Site

Hernando County · Gulf Coast

An 1850s plantation house on one of the highest hills in peninsular Florida, later owned by a man who advised seven presidents and met Lenin.

ABOUT THIS PLACE

Chinsegut Hill stands 269 feet above sea level, which makes it one of the highest points on the Florida peninsula. Colonel Byrd Pearson built a cabin here first. Francis Higgins Ederington, a South Carolinian, bought the property in 1851 and put up the manor house between 1852 and 1854. When he moved his family down from South Carolina in 1852 he brought 30 enslaved people with him, and the plantation grew sugar cane, cotton and corn before moving into citrus and timber. Raymond and Margaret Robins bought the place in 1904 and gave it the name Chinsegut. Raymond Robins advised every United States president from Theodore Roosevelt to Franklin Roosevelt, and met Lenin more than once during the Russian Revolution. After the crash of 1929 he gave the estate to the federal government, on the condition that he and Margaret could live there tax-free for the rest of their lives. The house went into the National Register of Historic Places on November 21, 2003. Hernando County holds it now, with the Tampa Bay History Center providing curatorial work since January 2020, and it runs as a historic site and museum with cabins that can be rented for weddings and events

GETTING THERE

Get Directions ↗Official place website ↗

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