The remaining house at Middleton place.If it feels like the posts are coming hard and heavy lately it is because our time in beautiful South Carolina is rapidly coming to a close, and it is time to hit the road back to the Northwest. Today (Thursday) is a down day for travelling. We are putting our stuff together, including 4 boxes that we are sending back home via UPS. Not only did we overpack, but we bought like goofy tourists. A trip to Walterboro for an oil change and tire rotation is the big trip for the day. Friday will bring us to the Edisto River for fishing and a catfish fry at David and Rita Blocker’s place on the river. David is Ron’s nephew and Roberta’s eldest son. After the family fish fry tomorrow we have softball games to attend Saturday in Walterboro. It will be our only chance to see Ron’s grandnieces Erin and Calli play. Erin is a 2006 graduate of USC-Upstate and Calli is a senior at Colleton County High. This will be followed by one last family dinner before we leave for Greenville.
On Tuesday we visited Charleston one more time. We did the largest ball of string thing again by visiting Trademark Properties on Market St. They are the company featured on the original tv series Flip This House and the Real Estate Pros, both shows that we enjoy watching. So proving, once again, that Ron is an uber-geek we had to visit and buy a tee-shirt. It was not a total waste of time since we found out that “Shoeless” Joe Jackson’s home is in Greenville SC, not Charleston as we thought. Shoeless Joe was a major league baseball player who was caught up in a scandal, though not guilty, in the 1919 World Series and has never been given his due place in the Hall of Fame. He is also one of the main characters in the movie Field of Dreams, probably Ron’s all-time favorite. So our exit route from South Carolina has since changed.
We also spent one last trip to the old marketplace and then went out Ashley River Road to go back to the 1800s and Middleton Place.
Words do not do justice to Middleton Place so I will insert this extract from their website and attach pictures:
Middleton Place was established early in the life of the Carolina colony and served as a base of operations for a great Low Country planter family and was home to a dynamic African-American slave community. Begun in 1741 by Henry Middleton, President of the First Continental Congress, the 60-acre landscaped garden was both an intellectual and emotional focus for successive generations of Middletons. Until 1865, the garden was nurtured and embellished by Henry's son, Arthur Middleton, a signer of the Declaration of Independence; Arthur Middleton's son, Henry Middleton, who was Governor of South Carolina and U.S. Minister to Russia; and Governor Henry Middleton's son, Williams Middleton, who signed the Ordinance of Secession. Despite long absences prompted by education abroad, military service, and public and diplomatic careers, Middleton family members have always returned to this Ashley River plantation.
The development and prosperity of the Gardens changed drastically during Williams Middleton's ownership. In signing the Ordinance of Secession, he endorsed the last Confederate cause; a failed attempt at independence that eventually led to the destruction of Middleton Place. On February 22, 1865, a detachment of the 56th New York Volunteer Regiment burned and looted the house and gardens. All that remained was the south dependency building, which is today the Middleton Place House Museum.
Two decades after the Civil War, during the great Charleston earthquake of 1886, Middleton Place was dealt yet another destructive blow. The Garden's terraces were ripped open and the water in the Butterfly Lakes was sucked dry, reshaping in just minutes what had taken scores of slaves a decade to build.
The Civil War and the great earthquake of 1886 had taken its toll, and Middleton Place Gardens lay overgrown and neglected until inherited by J.J. Pringle Smith in 1916. He soon began the massive project of restoring the Gardens to their original splendor of the mid-eighteenth century. The restoration of these elegant and beautiful Gardens gained national attention, and on the occasion of the Garden's bicentennial anniversary in 1941, The Garden Club of America awarded the Bulkley Medal to Middleton Place "in commemoration of Two Hundred Years of enduring Beauty." Fifty years later, the International Committee on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) has heightened that distinction, naming Middleton Place one of six U.S. gardens of international importance.
In 1974, J.J. Pringle Smith's heirs established the non-profit Middleton Place Foundation, which now owns the Middleton Place National Historic Landmark. Today, Middleton Place is a thriving restoration or eighteenth and nineteenth century plantation life. Having survived wars, earthquakes, and hurricanes, including Hurricane Hugo in September of 1989, Middleton Place remains a resilient masterpiece of landscape design and a well-preserved plantation that demonstrates two centuries of plantation life.
The remains of the original house.
Remains of the North Flank house
The family tomb
The Rice Mill Pond Bridge
Reflections in the Rice Mill Pond
What is being reflected
The plantation chapel
Slave cemetary
Blooming Magnolia Tree
Magnolia Blossom
Monster oak with Spanish Moss
Rice pond in the background
Walkwat by the reflection pond
Gator at rest
We spent about two hours walking around and taking pictures of this magnificent property. The only thing that cut our journey here short was dusk.
We have decided that Charleston is a city that we must visit again, spending much more time just walking the streets around the battery. I talked to a person a couple of nights ago who has a house in the Battery area that dates back to 1695. At some point in the future we will return and spend time at a bed & breakfast here so we can just soak in the history of this area.
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