Plantations

Some interesting and noteworthy features of South Carolina are the history and Southern pride, the accents and the antebellum structures. We visited several beautiful plantations on our trip.

Boone Hall

Known for its grand Avenue of Oaks leading up to the plantation house.

The slave cabins were preserved as little museums on the slave culture and way of life.

This is the one of the famous sweet grass baskets of the African culture and still sold along the streets of Charleston today.

Artifacts found in excavation under the slave quarters

This charming lady gave a special presentation on the "Gullah" culture, which comes from the slaves taken from the Angola region of African and preserved through descendants of today.

These massive oaks and spanish moss got me every time.

This guy gets me every time, too :)

Josh and I also visited the Magnolia Plantation, which boasted beautiful gardens and a plantation house preserved with pieces and stories true to its time. The wrap around porch was bigger than our house.

Another beautiful and historic landmark was Drayton Hall. It was one of the few homes that was not burned by the Union troops in the Civil War probably because it was flagged as a smallpox hospital. There was no furniture left in the home but everything about the house, including the paint, was all original. It was said to have housed Cornwallis at one point.

While we were there, a member of the Drayton family was measuring his one-year-old son on the centuries old growth chart in the house.

The front view

The back view to the river. We sat a while on the bench at the end of the lane.

Middleton Place

This plantation was special because we stayed at an inn on site and toured the grounds for a couple of days.

The main house was burned by the Union troops and remains still lay where they were burned. This flanker house is now a museum with amazing furniture and paintings from the actual Middleton family. Some paintings were hidden during the Civil War and returned and restored later.

Middleton Place is still a working plantation, for educational and tourism purposes. We talked with this cooper/carpenter for a while. Josh learned how to make barrels :)

More pictures of the amazing gardens of Middleton in the next post...