City: Brooksville   County: Hernando   Year: 2025
Location: 22495 Chinsegut Hill Road

SIDE ONE: Seminole Indians inhabited this area in the early 1800s. In 1842, a South Carolina lawyer, Col. Bird Pearson, claimed 6,000 acres from the US government and named the site Tiger Tail Hill. In 1851, Pearson sold the land to a fellow South Carolinian, Col. Francis Ederington. Ederington moved his wife, Precious Ann, their nine children, and eleven enslaved people onto the plantation, built the manor house, and developed a successful agricultural operation. He renamed the hill Mt. Airy. After his death in 1866, his eldest daughter, Charlotte, took over operation of the plantation. In 1871, she married Dr. Joseph R. Snow. They changed its name to Snow Hill and the newlyweds raised their family on the plantation, which continued to thrive. In the 1890s, a series of hard freezes devastated the citrus industry in Florida, Hernando County, and at Snow Hill Plantation. The Snows grafted tangerine and orange trees onto the hardy root stock of sour orange trees to climatize them to better survive freezes. This technique enabled most of the citrus industry in Hernando County to repopulate its citrus groves. SIDE TWO: In 1905, Colonel Raymond Robins, his sister Elizabeth, and wife Margaret, purchased the plantation from the Snow family. They renamed the property “Chinsegut Hill,” an Alaskan Inuit word meaning “a place where lost things are found.” Raymond, a Chicago attorney, served as an economic advisor to five presidents. Ernest Snow, son of Dr. Snow and Charlotte, remained with his family to manage the farm and help the Robinses acclimate to life in rural Florida. Fielder Harris, a freedman from South Carolina and childhood friend of Raymond Robins, became foreman of Chinsegut. During the Great Depression, the Robinses suffered severe losses and, in 1932, donated the 2,080-acre Chinsegut Hill property to the federal government. They collaborated with the Department of Agriculture to use the property as an experimental agricultural station to benefit Florida farmers. In return, the couple lived at Chinsegut Hill until their deaths. On November 21, 2003, Chinsegut Hill was added to the National Register of Historic Places. Ten years later, the home was restored through a grant from the Florida Division of Historical Resources, and in 2020, the Tampa Bay History Center opened the site as a museum.