On January 29, Bolles middle and upper school faculty members Danielle Jones and Sara Phillips-Bourass accompanied the French 4 and AP classes on an excursion to explore local Jacksonville history and its links to the French-speaking world. Students in Phillips-Bourass’ upper-level classes spent three weeks exploring the history of two important local sites: The Fort Caroline National Memorial and the Kingsley Plantation, both located in the Timucuan Preserve. 

Fort Caroline was an important part of the history of the colonization of the Americas and is remembered as the first landing of protestants in the United States. Bolles students read a variety of sources in French, including excerpts from a letter written by a soldier at the fort, a graphic novel written by a French author about “la Floride” and engravings depicting the culture and practices of the Timucua who were the first to have contact with the French colonizers. Students learned about the difficulties in interpreting historical documents and tried to imagine the reaction of the Timucua to the colonists. At the Fort Caroline National Memorial, they worked in groups to compare their coursework with the evidence provided by the archaeologists and historians who contributed to the memorial and its exhibits. They visited the museum and the reconstruction of the fort and compared their accuracy against the primary source documents.

To prepare for their visit to the Kingsley Plantation, students learned about the life of Anna Madgigine Jai Kingsley, tracing her voyage from her home in the Jolof Kingdom of Senegal to her life here in Jacksonville as a free Black woman and plantation owner. Anna’s story provided a window into the history of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, and students followed her from her origins as a princess of the Jolof royal family to the slave houses of Gorée Island to the slave markets of the Caribbean and to her marriage to the slave merchant Zephaniah Kinglsey. They learned how, once she and her children were freed by Kingsley, she rose to a position of authority over her plantations and fought to protect herself and her children from the injustices of plantation slavery. The family fled to Haïti when Florida was annexed by the United States, but Anna returned and faced the threat of re-enslavement so that she could defend her inheritance, founding a free Black community that operated in Jacksonville under her protection. 

“Students were surprised at how such a beautiful place could have been a site of so much injustice, and they were struck by the incongruity between the lavish lifestyle of the master’s family and that of their enslaved workers,” Phillips-Bourass said. 

Throughout the visit, the Bulldogs created videos on different topics to share with the students in the lower levels of French.

Phillips-Bourass was able to design this learning experience thanks to an Ottenstroer Teaching Fellowship Award, which allowed her to travel with Jones to Senegal in the summer of 2024. They visited the Maison des Esclaves on Gorée Island where Anna Kingsley might have been imprisoned and sold. The pair shared their personal experiences of travel in West Africa to enrich their teaching.

View pictures from the field trip in our online photo gallery. #BollesSanJose