Middleton Place Plantation - Part 1

Middleton Place Plantation House
(ALL the photos in these series are NOT for sale!)

View from the gate down to the Ashley river

A beautiful garden complex with ponds and the Ashley river in the back, very pretty in springtime for sure!

Pretty garden sculptures in nice surroundings

Majestic old oak trees are standing allover Middleton Place

Middleton Place (65 acres)

is a historic plantation with gardens located along the Ashley River at 4300 Ashley River Road, Charleston, South Carolina.

The plantation was established in 1741 by Henry Middleton, President of the First Continental Congress, and was home to generations of the family including Henry's son, Arthur Middleton, a signer of the United States Declaration of Independence; Arthur Middleton's son, Henry Middleton, Governor of South Carolina and U.S. Minister to Russia; and his son in turn, Williams Middleton, who signed the Ordinance of Secession.

The original main house was three stories tall, built of brick in Jacobean-style and flanked by two story wings. The north wing contained a library and ballroom, while the south wing was used as a guest house.

New records show that Middleton Place imported water buffalo from Constantinople in the late 1700s. These records show that these water buffalo were the first in the United States.

In 1865, near the end of the Civil War, the plantation was burned and looted by Union troops in retaliation for the owner's signing of the Ordinance of Secession. The soldiers killed and ate five of the water buffalo and stole six. These six later showed up in Central Park Zoo. Only the south building survived (built 1755), which is now the Middleton Place House Museum. Its gardens were further damaged by the great Charleston earthquake of 1886, and lay neglected until inherited by J. J. Pringle Smith in 1916, who then began their restoration. In 1941, on the garden's bicentennial, the Garden Club of America presented it with the Bulkley Medal "in commemoration of Two Hundred Years of enduring Beauty."

It was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1971.^[1][3]

In 1974 Smith's heirs donated the plantation to the non-profit Middleton Place Foundation.^{[citation needed]}

Today the plantation's house museum contains a collection of Middleton family furniture, paintings, books, and documents dating from the 1740s through the 1880s. The formal gardens consist of symmetric landscaped terraces, allées, ponds, and garden rooms. The International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) has named them one of six American gardens of international importance.^{[citation needed]}

The property is listed at the South Carolina Department of Archives and History.^[4]

In the Mel Gibson movie The Patriot, General Cornwallis is shown having a banquet at Middleton Place.^{[citation needed]}

Arthur Middleton was born at the house, and is buried there.

10 miles southeast of Summerville on South Carolina Rt. 61. / 12.5 miles northwest of Charleston on Rt. 61. It is open daily; an admission fee is charged.

Old History - Old Fort Dochester, SC

Dorchester County’s history dates back to 1696, when Dorchester was settled by two distinct groups that set sail from England. The Puritans came seeking religious freedom and the Anglicans came with the crown’s blessing to seek land and wealth. The Puritans arrived in 1696 from Dorchester, Massachusetts, and were responsible for the name of the town, the fort and eventually the county.

The Anglicans had been around for some 20 years when the Puritans arrived but St. George’s, Dorchester was not built until 1719. Together, the Anglicans and the Puritans built Dorchester into the third largest town in the state and an important shipping center for rice planters sending their goods down the Ashley River to Charleston. The tabby fort built of mud, oyster shells and limestone, now known as Colonial Dorchester State Historic Site, was constructed prior to the Revolutionary War and was used to defend the area. Such famous generals as Moultrie, Francis Marion and Wade Hampton held off the British from the fort.

The birth of Summerville at war’s end spelled the demise of Dorchester. All that remains is the fort, St. George’s bell tower and foundations of some houses, which are being carefully excavated.
Summerville started as Pineland Village around 1785 when plantation owners came here to escape the swamp fevers and insects. Before Dorchester County was formed in 1897, Summerville was situated in Charleston, Berkeley and Colleton Counties.

Dorchester County was very much a part of America’s first railroad. In 1830, the rails started at Charleston and ran through Summerville to Hamburg, opening the upper part of the county above Cypress Swamp.

Ridgeville got its name about that time and began to grow. St. George was originally named for the first settler, James George, who leased the land to the railroad and it became an important station on the line. Reevesville was founded in or near Indian Trail, supposedly before 1793, and several hundred members of the Edisto Indian tribe live in Indiantown today. They were officially recognized by the U.S. Department of the Interior in the 1970s. The rural town of Givhans is home to a state park on the banks of the Edisto River.

With the Civil War came the end of the plantation system and thus the end of the economy and the only lifestyle known to most of Dorchester’s inhabitants. Not until after Reconstruction was there a beginning of recovery.

In 1899, a world congress of medical specialists in the field of respiratory disease gathered in Paris. The group, known as “the Tuberculosis Congress,” named Summerville one of the two best areas in the world for the cure of lung and throat disorders. The town was so named because of its situation on a dry, sandy ridge, amidst pine trees that charge the air with derivatives of turpentine. Their findings were widely publicized and a golden era began for the lower part of Dorchester County; and one inn after another sprang up as the town quickly became a favorite winter resort for Northern visitors who came to enjoy the mild climate and hunting season. The most famous, the Pine Forest Inn, sometimes served as the Winter White House for Presidents William Howard Taft and Theodore Roosevelt.