ABSTRACT
In 2013, Florida celebrated the 500th anniversary of Ponce de Leon’s arrival in what is St. Augustine, approximately fifty miles south of the Timucuan Preserve. Touring the Kingsley Plantation provides a visceral reminder of Florida’s participation in the slave trade, and how the state’s Jim Crow laws maintained segregation and created a range of barriers in the post–Civil War era. The house—and Big Talbot Island—sits in the Timucuan Ecological and Historic Preserve, which includes both Talbot Islands, the Kingsley Plantation, the Fort Caroline National Monument, as well as recently discovered Native American burial mounds. The Low Country, so named for its extensive tidal flats and salt marshes, provides rich habitat for birds, and mollusks, and its nutrient-rich mud sustained the human ecologies of rice-growing plantations. From 1814 to 1837, Zephaniah Kingsley and his wife Anna, an ex-slave from Senegal, lived in what later became known as the Kingsley Plantation and produced commercial crops such as sea cotton and sugar cane.
