Word: hinsley
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...boosters insist the long-legged dwellings are a romantic reminder of how people and nature once harmoniously co-existed in Florida. "My son is studying to be a biologist because of the love for wildlife he nurtured out here," says J.R. Hinsley, a plant-nursery owner whose stilt house--a furnished, air-conditioned "hunt camp" he calls the Fontainebleau--sits above alligator nests deep in the Everglades, southwest of Boca Raton, accessible only by airboat. "People can call us swamp rats and rednecks all they want," says Hinsley's neighbor Don Kirk, 59, "but folks are supporting us because most...
Some "swamp rats," of course, have been known to treat the Everglades like a trailer park. But most, like Hinsley and Kirk, say they just want to preserve Florida's version of outback cowboy life--and a rare piece of history. Since the pre-Columbian era, the stilt house has been as much a part of the Caribbean waterscape as the windmill in Holland. Venezuela got its name when conquistadors marveled at the Indians' stilt huts and dubbed it "Little Venice." The Spanish dotted the Florida coasts with stilt houses, often built from wrecked galleons...