grand plantation homes but several notable gardens were brought back to life at different periods after The War. Yesterday we visited the oldest formal garden still in existence in the United States, and it was spectacular.
Well, let me start back at the beginning of our day. We headed out to Sullivan's Island to see Fort Moultrie. This fort played an important part during the Revolutionary War in guarding the entrance to Charleston Harbor. It saw action again during the events surrounding the fall of Ft. Sumter just across the harbor entrance. Sullivan's Island was a main landing point for slaves heading to the market in Charleston. It was also where a young man named Edgar Allan Poe was stationed in the army and where he later based one of his stories, The Gold Bug. We enjoyed lunch at Poe's Tavern; it would take a long time to read the walls in that washroom!
Looking on the map, we saw that we weren't far from one of the plantations on my list, but when we arrived there we decided to skip that one and to do Middleton Plantation and Gardens instead in hopes that we could dine at a famous restaurant on the property. We popped in across the road from Boone Hall Plantation to a Natl. Hist. site which belonged to the Pinkney family. Here the original house is entirely gone and mostly the grounds are open for their archaeology evidence. We watched an informative short video about the Pinkney family, looked around, and then drove to Middleton.
Those *****Yankees! A "renegade" group of soldiers from New York came up the river and landed at this beautiful place in February of 1865. The family had left (and they took silver and paintings and some furniture with them, apparently, because many of their treasures are now displayed in the house) ; the soldiers had a meal in the main dining hall of the big house and then they torched the three homes (main house with north and south "flanks", separate and smaller homes that matched the large house). The south flank was left partially intact while the ruins of the other two stood until the 1886 earthquake reduced them to piles of rubble which you can see today. The Middleton family restored the south flank after the war (with the help of a wealthy sister who had married into a Philadelphia family) and that is the home that we toured today. The gardens were begun in 1755 by Henry Middleton and are called the oldest formal gardens in the U.S. Of course, they were built by the slave labor that also made the plantation prosperous as a rice and indigo producer. Slaves were "treated well" here--there is even a small chapel on the property that they could attend. One of the larger slave cabins is restored and furnished. The grounds here also include paddocks for horses, sheep and goat pens (did they crop the grass?), and all the workshops and outbuildings that would have been needed to keep a small village like this sustained. Like the other plantations of the area, the homes were oriented toward the river, which was the main highway of the time. People who came overland had to use old Indian trails and that was a very long arduous trip. Also, most of the people who owned these plantations spent the summer months elsewhere, perhaps in the mountains of North Carolina or even in Newport, Rhode Island, because of the heat and the disease-carrying mosquitoes.
We found that the restaurant is "reservation only" and were unable to get reservations at 6:00 so we drove back to the Crab House for dinner. Not to deprive my readers of a sunset to go with that food photo, I snapped the glimpse of one on our way home. I think I am done now with the plantations. Today we head back into town.
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