…Aylesbury Plantation is just three miles from the Georgia-Florida state line.

 

…a gallon of gas in Georgia usually costs 10 to 20 cents less than in Florida. Why? Taxes.

 

…In 1900, Jefferson County had three times as many people as Dade County, Florida.

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AYLESBURY’S HISTORICAL SETTING

The history of the land that is now Aylesbury Plantation weaves an interesting web that connects some of Florida’s pioneer settlers and state leaders with their descendants who still farm the land today.

 

Aylesbury Shehee was a member of an Irish immigrant family who originally settled in Georgia, where Shehee was a member of the Georgia legislature.  In the 1820s, shortly after Florida became a territory, he was part of a small wave of planters from Georgia and the Carolinas who moved to the fertile lands of the Florida panhandle to grow cotton and other crops.  Shehee Lake, a few hundred yards east of the Aylesbury tract, bears his name and is a testament to his pioneer status.  At the time Shehee moved here, there were less than 10,000 people in Florida, nearly all of them north of present day Ocala.

 

Shehee acquired the north part of the Aylesbury Plantation land from the U.S. government in 1838.  Col. William J. Bailey acquired the southern part, again from the government, in 1854, after buying Shehee’s land.  Shehee decided in the 1840s to move his farming operation to Louisiana and sold his Florida holdings to Col. Bailey.

 

When Aylesbury Shehee moved to Louisiana, he left behind a daughter named Florida, who had just married John Finlayson, the owner of neighboring Glendower Plantation.   Finlayson was both a prominent planter and politician who became the president of the Florida Senate and was almost elected governor in 1860.  His descendants still own and farm the Glendower Plantation land adjacent to Aylesbury Plantation.

 

Col. William J. Bailey built a large estate that he named Lyndhurst.  The stately Georgian mansion that he built in the 1850s, which is about a mile southwest of Aylesbury Plantation, is one of only three antebellum plantation homes remaining in Jefferson County.  While Bailey was a proficient planter, he was known mainly for his military skills protecting local settlers from the native Indians that menaced them until shortly before the Civil War.  Bailey’s descendants, the Mays family, continued to hold the Aylesbury land until it was sold to its current owner, Lello Tarabini, in 1978. 

 

Another prominent figure in the Ashville plantation community was General William Bailey, the uncle of Col. William J. Bailey.  General Bailey owned a very large plantation northwest of Finlayson’s Glendower.  Finlayson and Bailey were close acquaintances and frequent business partners.  General Bailey was an economic powerhouse in early Florida and is credited with the construction of Florida’s first major road from St. Augustine to Pensacola.  He is probably also responsible for the beautiful oak canopied 150-year-old Quitman-Greenville Road that lies a few hundred yards west of the Aylesbury tract.

 

General Bailey’s land was purchased in the early 1900s by wealthy investor and financier Gerald Livingston, who renamed the property Dixie Plantation.  In the 1940s, Livingston, a former president of the New York Stock Exchange, built a huge Neoclassical mansion on the quail-hunting plantation.  When Livingston's daughter died a few years ago, she had the 9,200 acre estate placed in a conservation reserve trust that maintains it for bobwhite quail habitat.  Today, John Finlayson’s great-grandson is one of the trustees who oversees this reserve.