Myrtle Beach - again

If you've been following our blog, you know we stayed in Myrtle Beach when we headed south in the fall. Here we are again. Nothing much has changed except the traffic is worse and the weather is cooler. But, there's still a few things we didn't do when we were here last. This is the typical walk along the beach except this time I felt I was in Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds". Didn't get pecked though.

One thing we wanted to do which we didn't do in the fall was go to see a pre-civil war plantation. About an hours drive south of Myrtle Beach was the Hampton Plantation. We did a tour of the mansion but it didn't have any furniture but some of the walls were open so you could see the way the building was built.

The main road to the plantation is lined with Holly trees. You couldn't see most of the house, so when you arrived in front the sudden view was spectacular. To the right of this road was a horse race track so the plantation owners could come and race on Sundays and holidays.

Around the front yard were a number of very old oak trees. These were planted before the US became a country, around 1730. Remember, the US became a nation in 1774.

Right in front of the home is a giant oak, called the Washington Oak. After the US became a nation, George Washington traveled around the country convincing people to support the new nation. The southerners were particularly ambivalent about the whole thing. The owners of this plantation were among the most powerful people in the Carolinas and he stopped here to discuss the benefits of the new nation with them. Apparently, they discussed removing this tree to improve the view of the race track and Washington convinced them to leave it. Its kind of neat to look at a tree that George Washington had looked at as well. Thats around 250 years ago.

Although this was a working plantation, the owners planted a number of plants and trees to beautify the property. One of prettiest shrubs is the Camelia which blooms early in the year.

Our timing was great and we got to see dozens of Camelias in full bloom. In a couple of weeks, they will be finished but then it will be time for Magnolias to bloom. They planned their plants so that something would be blooming nearly all the time.

From 1730 to the civil war, this plantation made a fortune growing rice. A 350 acre island behind the mansion was cleared of trees, leveled and ditches were dug to allow controlled water flow to the rice plants. This was all done by hand by the over 365 slaves who toiled here. The owners made a fortune raising rice until the civil war when the market for rice dried up and the loss of slave labour made growing rice too expensive. A lot of the slaves, when freed, stayed on at the plantation as sharecroppers where they would work a patch of land and give most of the crop to the owners of the land as rent. There is a slave cemetery on the property and descendants of the original slaves are still being buried there. I always though of plantations as growing cotton, and didn't realize rice was also grown in that volume. Descendants of the original owners continued to own the plantation until the 1970's when the property was sold to the state of South Carolina and turned into a Heritage Site.