26 www.ReadMPM.com | www.MountPleasantMagazine.com | www.MountPleasantPodcast.com our town working plantations that produced crops such as indigo and rice, the latter the cash king also known as Carolina Gold. Sawyer added that by producing 50 percent of all the rice supplied throughout the Colonies, and later America, Georgetown became one of the richest counties in the country. Further, in and around Mount Pleasant, then known as Christ Church Parish, plantations such as Boone Hall prospered from cotton and brickmaking. This wealth would have been impossible to generate without the often backbreaking work of the enslaved. With tasks such as engineering and building dikes that controlled the tides of rice fields swamped with alligators, water moccasins and invisible Cypress stumps caked in pluff mud beneath murky waters, the enslaved worked from sunup to sundown, day in and day out, before returning to the village. During the plantation era, according to John Bentley, owner of Cap’n Rod’s Lowcountry Boat Tours, roads hadn’t yet been connected by bridges, and so the rivers were the highways. Boats, barges and ferries were the simplest ways to import and export visitors, supplies and the enslaved, who, according to Mary Boyd, volunteer at the Georgetown County Museum, were bought and transported from the markets in Charleston. Consequently, plantation manor houses are built facing the waterways, and cloaked behind avenues of oak trees, are invisible from modern streets. Following the emancipation of the enslaved in 1865, no one was left to work the fields or keep up the mansions. As a result, many plantation homes and the land surrounding them fell into disrepair. Others were lost to fire, hurricanes or earthquakes. By the 1960s, according to Sawyer, those defunct properties were sold to developers to be repurposed as golf courses or suburban gated neighborhoods. Of the manor houses that remain, many have been converted into event spaces or are privately held by descendants. Of the fraction that are open to visitors, each plantation has its own haunting and vainglorious history, which current owners, caretakers, curators, volunteers and nonprofits strive to honor and preserve. This summer, take the time to stroll the plantations’ sandy pathways lazing beneath oak trees shrouded with Spanish moss and listen for the soulful voices of the ancestors revealing the real stories behind the facades of the following manor houses. Also, cruise our rivers to see how Native Americans, Africans and the planters who exploited them approached these lands. For their legacies are your true plantation tour guides. BOONE HALL PLANTATION Start your plantation journey by carving out at least an entire day to spend at Boone Hall Plantation and absorb visitor favorites, which include “Exploring the Gullah Culture” live presentations. True descendants of the Gullah people present the history of this culture through storytelling, song and dance that is at times educational, and at times very moving and emotional. These Gullah ladies share uplifting spiritual messages of love and understanding of how overcoming the hardships of the past have brought them to a better place today, because in the words of Ms. Gloria Ford, Gullah Presenter at Boone Hall, “We must leave the divisiveness of the past behind in order to move forward and claim the future.” The “Historical Dwelling History Talk” discusses enslaved Boone Hall Plantation. Hampton Plantation.
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