Kingsley Plantation (also known as the Zephaniah Kingsley Plantation Home and Buildings) is the site of a former estate on Fort George Island, in Duval County, Florida, that was named for its developer and most famous owner, Zephaniah Kingsley, who spent 25 years there. It is located at the northern tip of Fort George Island at Fort George Inlet, and is part of the Timucuan Ecological and Historic Preserve managed by the U.S. National Park Service. Kingsley's house is the oldest plantation house still standing in Florida, and the solidly-built village of slave cabins is one of the best preserved in the United States. It is also "the oldest surviving antebellum Spanish Colonial plantation in the United States."
The plantation originally occupied the entirety of Fort George Island, described variously as occupying 713, 720, or "750 acres [300 ha] more or less". According to park literature, most of it has been taken back over by forest; the structures and grounds of the park now comprise approximately .Carter, John (October 20, 2004). "Slave history event at Kingsley site: Plantation having 'a sort of family reunion'." Florida Times-Union (Jacksonville), p. N-1. Evidence of pre-Columbian Timucua life is on the island, as are the remains of a Spanish mission named San Juan del Puerto. Under British rule in 1765, a plantation was established that cycled through several owners while Florida was transferred back to Spain and then the United States. The longest span of ownership was under Kingsley and his family, a polygamous and multiracial household controlled by and resistant to the issues of race and slavery.
The principal business at the Kingsley Plantation was slaves: buying, selling, and training them. Kingsley's slaves commanded a premium in the market. Raising salable cotton was a secondary business. As they were very isolated they also had to raise their food, in small gardens.
Free blacks and several private owners lived at the plantation until it was purchased by the State of Florida in 1955. It was acquired by the National Park Service in 1991.
The most prominent features of Kingsley Plantation are the owner's house—a structure of architectural significance built probably between 1797 and 1798 that is cited as being the oldest surviving plantation house in the state—and an attached kitchen house, barn, and remains of 25 anthropologically valuable slave cabins that endured beyond the U.S. Civil War (1861–1865). The foundations of the house, kitchen, barn, and the slave quarters were constructed of durable tabby concrete. Archeological evidence found in and around the slave cabins has given researchers insight into African traditions among slaves who had recently arrived in North America.
Zephaniah Kingsley wrote a defense of slavery and the three-tier social system that acknowledged the rights of free people of color that existed in Florida under Spanish rule. Kingsley briefly served on the Florida Territorial Council.
Kingsley Plantation was not Kingsley's only or even his primary plantation. His plantation on Drayton Island has not been studied. "At the other end of Fort George, now Batten Island, he built himself a house of some size, which is now in ruins; there lived Flora, his black mistress. He divided his time about equally between the two places." "In the 1830 census he owned only 39 slaves at the present Fort George site, but 188 at a little-known San José plantation, in Nassau County. In 1836 he moved his entire family from Florida, since Kingsley's free Blacks were ever more unwelcome and insecure, to a plantation called Mayorasgo de Koka, at the time in Haiti but from the 1840s in the Dominican Republic. Little remains of Mayorasgo de Koka.
History
Pre-Columbian settlement and colonization
Fort George Island is located in Duval County, several miles northeast of downtown Jacksonville. It is a marsh island at the mouth of the St. Johns River, surrounded by tidal estuaries, Little Talbot Island, and the Nassau River.Stowell (1996), p. 2. The north Atlantic coast of Florida had been inhabited for approximately 12,000 years when Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de León landed near Cape Canaveral in 1513. The Spanish met the Saturiwa, a Timucua tribe, who were the largest group of indigenous people in the region, numbering about 14,000. Bands of Timucua extended into central Florida and south Georgia. An estimated 35 chiefdoms existed in the territory,Milanich, p. 1. and their societies were complex with large villages sustained by fishing, hunting, and agriculture, but they frequently warred with each other and unrelated groups of Native Americans.Stowell (1996), p. 5. The Spanish concentrated their efforts of exploration and settlement on the Gulf Coast of Florida. By 1562, Jean Ribault led French explorers to the mouth of the St. Johns River where they built a garrison in 1564, calling it Fort Caroline. Within 200 years the population of the indigenous people of Florida was decimated by disease and constant fighting.Stowell (1996), pp. 15–21. They left behind evidence of their existence in massive middens or shell mounds filled with discarded food byproducts. On Fort George Island, the shells were primarily oysters.
Ownership of Florida transferred to the United Kingdom in 1763. Spanish settlers had established missions—including one on Fort George Island named San Juan del Puerto that eventually gave the nearby St. Johns River its name—but their frequent battles with the Timucua and a decline in mission activity curbed development.Gannon, p. 57. When the British controlled Florida, they established several plantations in the region. Richard Hazard owned the first plantation on Fort George Island in 1765, harvesting indigo with several dozen enslaved Africans. Spain regained ownership of Florida in 1783 after the American Revolution and recruited new Americans with promises of free land.Stowell (1996), p. 27.
In 1793, American Revolution veteran John "Lightning" McQueen (1751–1807) was lured to Fort George Island from South Carolina by the Spanish government, which rewarded McQueen with the island. McQueen settled with 300 slaves and constructed a large house in a unique architectural style exhibiting four corner pavilions surrounding a great room. McQueen was soon bankrupt due to misfortunes, and the possession of the plantation turned over to John Houston McIntosh (1773–1836) from Georgia who revived it in 1804.Stowell and Tilford, pp. 4–6. McIntosh, however, took a leading role in the Patriot War, an insurgency by Americans to hasten the annexation of Florida to the United States. The rebellion was unsuccessful, and McIntosh fled back into Georgia to escape punishment from the Spanish.Stowell and Tilford, p. 7.
Kingsley's family
Born in Bristol, England and educated in London after his family moved to colonial South Carolina, Zephaniah Kingsley (1765–1843) established his career as a slave trader and shipping magnate, which allowed him to travel widely. He settled on Fort George Island in 1814 after leasing it from McIntosh. He purchased the land and buildings for $7,000 in 1817 (). Kingsley owned several plantations around the lower St. Johns River in what is today Jacksonville, and Drayton Island in central Florida; two of them may have been managed part-time by his wife, a former slave named Anna Madgigine Jai (1793–1870). Kingsley married Anna in 1806 when she was 13 years old, recently arrived in Cuba from West Africa.Schafer (1997), p. 11. He freed her in 1811 and charged her with running his Laurel Grove plantation at Doctors Lake in modern-day Orange Park. His legal emancipation submitted to the Spanish colonial government read
Let it be known that I ... possessed as a slave a black woman called Anna, around eighteen years of age, bought as a bozal [newly imported African]Jackson and Burns, p. 17. in the port of Havana from a slave cargo, who with the permission of the government was introduced here; the said black woman has given birth to three mulatto children: George, about 3 years 9 months, Martha, 20 months old, and Mary, one month old. And regarding the good qualities shown by the said black woman, the nicety and fidelity which she has shown me, and for other reasons, I have resolved to set her free ... and the same to her three children.Schafer (1997), p. 19.
Marriages between white plantation owners and African women were common in East Florida.Schafer (1997), pp. 15–17. The Spanish government provided for a separate class of free people of color, and encouraged slaves to purchase their freedom. Slavery under Spain in Florida was not considered a lifelong condition, and free blacks were involved in the economic development of the region, many of them owning their own slaves.Tilford, Kathy (Fall 1997). "Anna Kingsley: A Free Woman", OAH Magazine of History, 12 (1), pp. 35–37. Anna oversaw 60 slaves at Fort George Island, who grew sea island cotton, citrus, corn, sugarcane, beans, and potatoes. John Maxwell, the fourth child, was born in 1824 when Kingsley and Anna lived on Fort George Island.Schafer (1997), p. 38. Kingsley also maintained relationships with three other African women who acted as co-wives or concubines: Flora H., Sarah M.; and Munsilna McGundo. Anna Jai remained the matriarch in the polygamous family. Historian Daniel Schafer posits that Anna Jai would have been familiar with the concepts of polygamy and marrying a slave master to acquire one's freedom.Schafer (2003), p. 31.Kingsley was often away on business, during which Anna Jai would assume management responsibilities for the plantation. Anna Jai befriended a white woman named Susan L'Engle, who came from Fernandina to visit Kingsley on business, and spent time with Anna Jai. Kingsley's absence and his time spent with his other wives gave L'Engle the impression that Anna Jai was lonely at Fort George Island, despite all her responsibilities. Susan L'Engle told her stories to her great granddaughter, children's author Madeleine L'Engle, who wrote them in her book Summer of the Great Grandmother. Anna Jai is referred to as "the African Princess" in the book; there is some belief that Anna Jai may have been the daughter of a ruling family in West Africa. (Schafer, pp. 5, 15–18, 58.) Visitors to the plantation were invited to a dinner table where Kingsley displayed his multi-racial children with pride. He provided them with the best education he could afford, and considered them a shield from any potential racial uprising.