Photo by Ruta Smith
Beneath a stand of towering and majestic 100-year-old live oaks, and in front of a towering and majestic plantation house nearly 60 years older, Ashley Hollinshead, an interpretive aide for the McLeod Plantation Historic Site, pulls out an iPad to show my tour group a digital image of what the house used to look like, from the same vantage point, in the mid-1850s.
For a moment, the juxtaposition of history and modern technology is surprising, but embracing the complex transformations of history is the purpose of the 37-acre site on the banks of Wappoo Creek. Owned and operated by the Charleston County Park and Recreation Commission, the plantation is not solely a testament to the Civil War landowners or the enslaved people who worked the land, but also a testament to the people who continued living on the site until 1990.
“This is a different experience,” says Shawn Halifax, the site’s cultural history interpretative coordinator. “We deliberately talk about life on a plantation site through the end of the 20th century. That’s not something that’s added on or an afterthought. That’s part of our focus.”
He goes on: “That really sets this place apart, but it also allows our visitors to make real connections to the site, because, for most of our visitors who come out here, we’re talking about events within their lifetime.”
Guided interpretive tours begin in the visitors center with a timeline exhibit built around a cotton gin. The timeline breaks the site’s history into four periods: 1851–1862, the Old South period; 1862–1865, the Civil War period; 1865–1869, the Reconstruction period; and 1869–1990, the New South period.
Every 45-minute tour begins at this exhibit and covers all four periods, stopping at different locations—the main house, the cotton gin house, the dairy and kitchen, the tenant homes, and the worship house. The interpretive aides, many of whom are graduate students in history at nearby College of Charleston, speak knowledgeably and empathetically about the site’s history and people. Indeed, Hollinshead tries to show each location through the eyes of an enslaved person, or a newly emancipated citizen during Reconstruction, or an African-American trying to navigate life in the 20th century.
Telling the story, for instance, of a young, enslaved girl who had to march blindfolded from Georgetown to Charleston, Hollinshead says, “I just want you guys to think about what she was going through. She’s this young child, and she’s just been separated from her parents and her home and anything at all familiar to her, and she’s coming here to McLeod.”
The story is sobering and powerful, because it does not shy away from the realities of history. And by doing so, the tour becomes a fuller commemoration of the past, even if that past is full of contradictions.
At different times during the Civil War, for instance, both Confederate and Union troops occupied the main house. During Reconstruction, the Freedmen’s Bureau—a government agency helping emancipated people—made James Island its field office and issued land titles on the plantation’s grounds. But then, after Lincoln’s assassination, president Andrew Johnson revoked the titles. Many formerly enslaved people were thus forced to work as tenant farmers, often in debt.
All of it happened here, and none of it gets obscured by a vision of the South that is all moonlight and magnolias.
So, likewise, the site does not shy away from the future. Visitors to McLeod Plantation Historic Site can also download a user-friendly “Transition to Freedom” iPhone app that serves as a kind of digital tour guide. Pinned locations, many of which are not covered on the interpretive tour, can be tapped for more information, which is narrated by Ron Daise, the creator of the former Nickelodeon show Gullah Gullah Island. Each narration is also accompanied by quotations from authors and oral histories that help illuminate the historical importance of the location.
New discoveries continue to shape the experience at McLeod Plantation Historic Site.
“We’re constantly doing research here,” explains Hollinshead. “Just a few months ago, we thought the kitchen was added in 1925, but we came across a photograph of the kitchen in 1905 attached to the home! We’re constantly redoing our tours, changing them to fit the new research we find.”
The result is that visitors sense they are participating in the life of the site. And, indeed, new research continues to help expand the programming and historic preservation. Halifax cites, among other things, new work being done to identify the ancestors of those buried in the cemetery, as well as an expansion of arts programs and special-event weekends.
Later this summer and through the fall, the plantation staff will invite guests to help cultivate and harvest a quarter-acre patch of the original Sea Island cotton grown here from the 1860s to 1920. Bill McLean, a James Island resident, and Richard Porcher, author of A History of Sea Island Cotton, found the seeds in a U.S. Department of Agriculture seed bank and worked with McLeod Plantation to sow them near the main house as one more way for visitors to experience history in the present, says Halifax.
“When you start to talk about things people have lived through themselves, then you start to have a conversation,” says Halifax. “People can speak from their experiences and their perspectives, and that just adds to the understanding that history and society and culture are very complex.”
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Get There
McLeod Plantation Historic Site is located at 325 Country Club Drive on James Island.
HOURS: 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., Tuesday–Sunday
ADMISSION: $15 for adults over 13, $12 for those 60 years old and over, and $6 for children 12 and under. Admission includes a 45-minute interpretive tour.
GET THE APP: The McLeod Plantation “Transition to Freedom” app can be downloaded for free from the Apple App Store or by following this link: ccprc.com/1447/McLeod-Plantation Historic-Site
GET HANDS-ON: Volunteers who wish to help cultivate and pick the quarter-acre Sea Island cotton field should contact Shawn Halifax at (843) 762-9508 or shalifax@ccprc.com.