Florida's oldest standing plantation house on Fort George Island, now part of the National Park Service's Timucuan Ecological & Historic Preserve, where the site's enslaved community is the documented historical reality behind centuries of folklore.
11676 Palmetto Avenue, Jacksonville, FL 32226
Research updated June 2026
Age
All Ages
Cost
Free
Free admission as a unit of the National Park Service.
Access
Wheelchair OK
NPS site with paved paths, gravel walkways, and preserved historic structures.
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1798 · Florida's oldest standing plantation house · 23 surviving tabby slave residences · Home of Anna Madgigine Jai Kingsley (Wolof, b. ~1793, d. 1870) · Unit of the NPS Timucuan Ecological & Historic Preserve since 1991
The planter's house at Kingsley Plantation was built around 1797-1798 on Fort George Island, north of present-day Jacksonville, and is the oldest plantation house still standing in Florida. The 60-acre core of the site preserves the main house, kitchen house, barn, garden, and the tabby ruins of 23 quarters where the plantation's enslaved community lived and worked.
From 1814 to 1837 the property was operated by Zephaniah Kingsley and Anna Madgigine Jai. Anna was a Wolof woman taken from Senegal and sold into slavery; Kingsley purchased her in Havana around 1806 when she was approximately 13 years old, and later married her and freed her. Anna became a substantial landowner in her own right and managed plantation operations. The Kingsley household included additional African wives and nine mixed-race children. The Kingsleys advocated for Spanish-era racial protections; when Florida became a U.S. territory and free-person-of-color restrictions tightened, the family relocated members to Haiti beginning in 1835.
The property changed hands repeatedly across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The State of Florida acquired it in 1955, and in 1991 the National Park Service assumed management as part of the Timucuan Ecological & Historic Preserve. Today the site is administered as a public history and interpretive resource, with ranger-led programs centering the lives of the enslaved community.
Sources
The Jaxson reports the plantation's most-circulated legend as 'Old Red Eyes,' described as a pair of glowing eyes in the woods seen since 1978 and most prominently retold in a 1993 account by local resident Tes Rais and amplified by folklorist Alan Brown. The Jaxson and other commentators have specifically flagged that the underlying 'Red Eyes' backstory — an enslaved man framed as a violent criminal lynched by his fellow enslaved people — mirrors the implausible justification narratives historically used to rationalize the lynching of Black Americans, and that the legend lacks any supporting historical record. NPS ranger Emily Palmer, cited by The Jaxson, offers the prosaic explanation that the lights are likely opossum eye-shine reflecting passing brake lights. HauntBound presents this lore only with that critical context.
Other reported phenomena at the site include a 'woman in white' that some retellings attribute to Anna Kingsley (although Anna had not lived on Fort George Island for more than three decades before her death in 1870, complicating that identification), a crying child reported near the well, and a Black figure described inside the main house. According to repeated local reports, staff are said to avoid the phrase 'Goodnight, Mr. Kingsley' inside the house.
Visitors interested in the site should be aware that the genuine emotional weight here is historical rather than folkloric: real enslaved people lived, labored, and died at Kingsley Plantation. The National Park Service's interpretation centers those documented lives, and the site is best engaged as a serious historic place rather than as a thrill venue.
Notable Entities
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Visit Florida's oldest standing plantation house and the preserved tabby ruins of 23 slave residences. Ranger interpretation centers the lives of the enslaved community and of Anna Madgigine Jai, an enslaved Wolof woman whom Zephaniah Kingsley married and later freed.
Every HauntBound history is researched from documented sources. We clearly separate verified historical fact from paranormal folklore.
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