Boone Hall (Plantation : S.C.)

Boone Hall Plantation; one of America's oldest working plantations, continually producing agricultural crops for over 320 years. The antebellum era plantation is located in Mount Pleasant, Charleston County, South Carolina, United States and listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The historic site includes a 1936 Colonial Revival style dwelling, a number of unique, brick slave cabins (occupied by enslaved people, then by sharecroppers well into the 20th century), as well as multiple significant landscape features, including an allée of southern live oak trees believed to have been planted in 1743.

The earliest known reference to the site is in 1681 in a land grant of 470 acres (1.9 km2) from owner Theophilus Patey to his daughter Elizabeth and her new husband Major John Boone as a wedding gift when the land became known as Boone Hall Plantation, but it is unknown when a house was built on the site. John Boone was one of the early settlers of the South Carolina colony, arriving in 1672. Boone and his wife were ancestors of Founding Fathers Edward Rutledge and John Rutledge. When Boone died, he divided his estate among his wife and five children with his eldest son, Thomas, making Boone Hall his home.

The Boone family owned the plantation until fourteen years after John Boone's death, when his widow Sarah Gibbes Boone sold the property to Thomas A. Vardell for $12,000 in 1811. Shortly after, Henry and John Horlbeck bought the property, using a number of the enslaved people who were previously employed in agricultural work as brick making laborers. By 1850, these enslaved laborers produced 4 million bricks, by hand, per year. The fingerprints of these people are still visible in the bricks of many of these historic sites.

When Henry Horlbeck died in 1837, several of his children settled his estate by transferring their interests in Boone Hall to four of his sons—Henry, Daniel, Edward, and John Horlbeck. The sale occurred on October 1, 1842.

Canadian Thomas Stone purchased Boone Hall Plantation in 1935 from the Horlbeck estate demolished the truly historic structure, replacing it with a historicized, yet modern house in 1936.
In 1940, the Stones sold the plantation to Georgian prince Dimitri Jorjadze and his wife Audrey Emery Jorjadze, an American socialite. The Jorjadzes sold the plantation to Dr. Henry Deas in 1945, who in turn sold to Harris M. McRae and his wife Nancy in 1955. The McRaes continued to farm the land with a focus on growing peach trees, and eventually opened the plantation to public tours in 1956.

The most notable feature of the grounds is the grand Avenue of Oaks that was first planted in 1743 and completed by the Horlbeck brothers in 1843. On axis with the front facade of the house, the allée consists of 88 live oak trees and one magnolia, that are evenly spaced, and run 3/4 of a mile from the entrance of the plantation to a pair of brick gateposts.
The original slave cabins date from between 1790 to 1810. Built of brick, the one-story structures are 12 feet by 30 feet with gabled roofs, have either plank or dirt floors and a simple fireplace with a brick hearth and no mantle at the rear of each house. The cabins were in use well into the 20th century, as they were occupied by sharecroppers through the 1940s. These dwellings were continuously occupied by enslaved, then free sharecroppers fo nearly 150 years, making them incredibly significant to the history of the site.