Kingsley Plantation House at Timucuan Ecological and Historic Preserve

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Florida had been a Spanish territory since the mid-1500s, but it fell into British hands after the Seven Years War (aka The French and Indian War, 1756-1763), a war that embroiled all of Europe. While Spain retained Florida after the war, it lost Havana, Cuba, to the British (Spain held the rest of the country). During treaty negotiations, a land-swap deal was worked out, part of which gave Florida to England and Havana back to Spain.

The two countries went to war again during the American Revolution, with Spain fighting on the side of the Americans, though it did so more for its own reasons than to help the Americans. Being on the side of victory, Spain was awarded Florida by the 1783 Treaty of Paris. With the territory back in its hands, Spain now set out to attract loyal settlers to the area by offering free land in exchange for a promise to covert to Catholicism and to become a Spanish citizen. This offer brought John McQueen to Florida, and he was given Fort George Island in 1791.

McQueen settled the area, bringing with him 300 slaves and constructing a large house in 1798. His main crop was Sea Island cotton, a crop that became popular during the English colonial days. Sea Island cotton fetched the highest price of any cotton due to its long fibers (staple) and silky texture. Unfortunately, by the early 1800s McQueen was bankrupt and was forced to sell the island. John McIntosh made the purchase in 1804.

McIntosh become a leader in what is known as the Patriot Rebellion, a covert attempt by the Americans to wrestle Florida from Spanish control that lasted from 1811 until 1814. The U. S. government felt war with England was inevitable—the War of 1812 proved it correct—and that the sparsely populated Spanish territory would be easy for the British to infiltrate, thus giving them a base to attack Georgia and the other southern states. Plantation owners like McIntosh, on the other hand, wanted to take control of Florida because it had become a haven for runaway slaves, and they feared there were enough of them to start a slave revolt. This common goal brought the two factions together, with the U. S. government secretly backing the rebellion with arms and money while the American settlers did the fighting. However, the government ultimately disavowed involvement, creating an early 1800s version of the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba.

With the Spanish and their Black and Seminole Indian allies closing in on him, McIntosh elected to escape back to the United States, but before doing so he burned down his own plantation. In 1814, when the Spanish finally quashed the revolt, Zephaniah Kingsley purchased Fort George Island. He was the owner of a plantation at Doctors Lake in modern-day Orange Park, which is just south of Jacksonville on the St. Johns River. Despite being a slave trader and owning many slaves, Kingsley had remained loyal to Spain. His plantation home had been destroyed during the rebellion.

Kingsley made his fortune as a slave trader. In 1806, during a trip to Cuba he purchased 13-year-old Anna Madgigine Jai, a girl from Senegal, then married her soon afterwards—the marriage was not recognized by Spain or the United States. In 1811, under Spanish law, he freed her and the three children who they had together. Anna would go on to run Kingsley’s plantation at Fort George Island, and was even awarded her own land by the Spanish for bravery during the Patriot Rebellion (supposedly it was she who destroyed Kingsley’s Doctors Lake plantation to keep it and its cache of food and four cannon from falling into rebel hands). Being from Senegal, it was not unusual for a woman to run a farm and not unusual for Africans to own other slaves; Anna would eventually own slaves as well.

Unlike the United States, Spain recognized free blacks as a different class of people than slaves, though they were not equivalent to Whites or Spanish. However, when Spain sold Florida to the United States in 1821, the distinction between free blacks and slaves began to disappear little by little under a flurry of new laws. While he was all for slavery, Kingsley believed in the Spanish system where free blacks had rights. He was particularly disturbed that his wife and children could not inherit his land due to their color, despite being free. He fought against these laws by giving speeches, writing essays, and even writing two books against racial discrimination, but finally gave up. In 1837 he moved his family to Haiti, the only free black country at the time. Kingsley himself did not move, but he traveled between Florida and Haiti while he kept his plantations running. All this time he continued to profit from slave labor.

Kingsley sold the Fort George Island plantation to his nephew Kingsley Beatty Gibbs in 1839. Gibbs in turn sold it to John Lewis in 1853, and it then changed hands a number of times in rather quick succession: Charles Thomson in 1854, Charles Barnwell in 1860. After the Civil War, the Freedman’s Bureau, a federal agency created to aid the newly freed slaves, took over the island and allowed the former slaves to live in their cabins and farm the land.

In 1869, John Rollins purchased the island. Without the free slave labor, farming just wasn’t that profitable, and it was Rollins who began the tourist industry when he and his partners built the Fort George Island Hotel in 1875. Unfortunately, the resort business was short lived, for the hotel burned down in 1889, about the same time yellow fever hit the island and kept tourists away. Rollins continued to live in the Kingsley Plantation house, and the property was inherited by his daughter, who lived in it with her family until she sold it in 1923 to Navy Admiral Victor Blue and his group of private investors.

Blue purchased the property for his Army Navy Club, a private club for retired military officers. The plantation house was used as the clubhouse until a new building was constructed (today’s Kingsley Plantation Visitor Center). Blue and his investors would later build the Ribault Club, which is now owned by the state of Florida and part of Fort George Island Cultural State Park.

After World War II, tourism declined and the property changed hands a number of times, with each new owner trying to figure out a way to make money. The Ribault Club and golf course remained open until 1991, with the last few years being under state control. The state of Florida purchased the Kingsley Plantation in 1955 and ran it as a tourist attraction under the name Kingsley Plantation State Historic Site. Shortly after the Timucuan Ecological and Historic Preserve was created in 1988, the plantation grounds were handed over to the federal government, and it is now under the management of the National Park Service.

Today the plantation retains the name Kingsley because nearly all of the buildings on the property were built by Zephaniah Kingsley. Remember, everything had been destroyed by McIntosh. Even the plantation house, which was heavily damaged, was restored by Kingsley.