The Front Door Project Visits: Boone Hall Plantation

From the moment we turned off of the main road and started slowly driving under Boone Hall’s canopy of almost three hundred year old southern live oak trees I knew I would love my visit to Boone Hall Plantation.

The Avenue of Oaks, as it is referred to, was originally planted in 1743 by members of the Boone family (although there is some documented debate about the timing), descendants of the original owner Major John Boone.  Major Boone was granted 400 acres of property in 1681 as a wedding gift by Theophilis Patey, father of his bride Elizabeth.

That gift began a long and illustrious history spanning hundreds of years and multiple owners.

The plantation is now owned by the McRae family, who purchased it in 1955. It continues to be a working farm in addition to being a tourist destination where visitors can learn about the crops that were once grown there, the architecture of the home and the day-to-day activities of the people who lived there.

Our tour guide told us that members of the McRae family still stay in the home from time to time, so only portions of the house are available to tour. It’s worth noting that the home you see above was not the original home of the Boone family. The original home was much smaller, and a more recent owner decided the property needed a residence with more grandeur.

Over its hundreds of years of history, the plantation grew many crops including indigo, cotton and its most lucrative crop, pecans. They were the largest US pecan grower at one point in time, and also generated a great deal of wealth from brick making on the property.

I was surprised to learn that pecans were a huge crop in the South. I have always ignorantly envisioned every plantation growing only cotton!

Today, strawberries are a significant crop but many other varieties of crops are planted to support farm-to-table programs in the Lowcountry area. The property is also used for weddings, festivals, Civil War re-enactments (where the South always wins!) and as a movie and television set (remember “The Notebook”?)

The above is a rear view of the home, which I find to be much more beautiful than the front. See that planter in the middle?  I backed right into that while trying to take a picture. Totally wiped out and scraped my hands and arms and ruined my white jeans. You’re welcome!! Plus I looked quite foolish in front of a bunch of other tourists! But I have to say it was worth it.

The gardens were just beginning to green up when we visited, so I’m sure by now they are very lush and gorgeous. Garden tours are offered at Boone Hall, in addition to home tours and a wagon tour of the property. You can do as much or as little as you want, and everything would likely take about four hours. Enjoy a snack of homemade ice cream on the property as well.

However, among all this beauty and charm lie signs of the plantation’s past that cannot be ignored. In the photo above, you can see the back of one of nine remaining slave cabins on the property, about a third of the original number. The cabins line the front of the property parallel to the Avenue of Oaks as plantation owners flaunted their slaves as a sign of wealth.

Multiple generations of a single family would live in one cabin and sometimes as many as two families lived in each. Each of the nine cabins currently displays artifacts from the era as well as plaques documenting the path to freedom and the Civil Rights movement.

The plantation presents a sanitized view of slavery which disappointed me.

There was very little documentation of the torture and atrocities suffered by the slaves that lived there and across the South. When we took our walking tour in Charleston, our tour guide (a 13th generation Charlestonian) said that it is only in recent years that many Southerners will discuss slavery at all. Her grandmother’s generation referred to it as “The Great Unpleasantness” and though it was a joke I was somewhat offended that the tour guide at Boone Hall referred to the Civil War as “The War of Northern Aggression”. Many people I spoke to on my trip said that a lingering bitterness over the War exists to this day.

I don’t hold the North harmless when it comes to slavery, though. Although in the end the North helped to free the slaves, in the meantime they greatly profited from the wealth generated by slave labor in the Old South.

As a country we need to do more to document and demonstrate the truth about slavery instead of glossing over it. The Preservation Nation blog has a wonderful list of places that are doing just this, including the Slave Mart in Charleston.

So while I appreciate the beauty of Boone Hall, and am glad to see it preserved for future generations to learn and use, when you visit be sure to take a few moments to remember how much of that wealth was accumulated on the backs of slaves.