Visited Boone Hall Plantation, a still working farm, the owners live in the top floor "when they are in town" and the whole property of 738 acres (at one time was 4200 acres) is well used for produce, grapevines, tours, and Sunday is the Taste of Charlotte Festival! A lot of the property was sold off in the 1940s result of a bitter divorce. Mr. Boone had 60 slaves but THEN Mr. Horlbeck of Germany purchased the plantation and had 300 slaves. I thought Jeff who took us on a tour of the first floor of the plantation house is quite cute and oh so southern.
These are the slave homes of the "Skilled" slaves. There were 29 of these, about 360 square feet and 16-20 people lived in each one, built between 1790-1910. The other slaves worked the fields and lived in woodframe huts near the crops. Indigo, rice (Carolina Gold) and cotton were the favored crops. Now there is fresh produce, fruit fields and muscadet grapevines for wine and jelly. Next picture is Caroline the speaker on the Gullah culture at cabin number 9 - Gullahs are the African-Americans who inhabit the Lowcountry of South Carolina. She was fortunate in that as a young girl attended Ashley School in Charleston - I felt she was well educated and has a career of speaker wherever in the country people want to hear the story. She was a great joketeller. One of her stories about people who don't talk much (like Ross) - is to say "Don't Crack Your Teeth". She admits to being 72 years old. The slaves only came with first names but then often took the names of their owners, hence a lot of Boones in Charleston, and if not that took the last names of the founding fathers of our country, like Jackson, Washington, etc.
No comments:
Post a Comment