Charleston, Charleston...

I suppose there are worse earworms:

We traveled to Charleston in one go directly from St. Augustine.  By we I mean Sam and I.  Reg and Riley rented a car and stayed in a hotel instead of sailing straight for 34 hours.  I think the rough crossing from the Bahamas has scared Reg away for life.

The houses along the waterfront on the way into Charleston were stunning.

The local college sports teams are called the Cougars.  And here I thought I had found the perfect club for me!

This house was being raised from it's foundations presumable to protect from flooding. I wish I had been there on a weekday to watch the work.

We spent two nights in Charleston so I would have time to visit a southern plantation (and go to a farmer's market - strawberries are in season down here!). We chose the McLeod Plantation mostly because the location on Jame's island is a short Uber from the marina.

The cotton plantation was purchased by the McLeod family in the mid 1850s. When the Union army advanced on James' island in 1862, the family was forced to evacuate. They took most of their slaves with them but 10 fled in the night prior to the evacuation to try and reach the union troops and freedom. History is silent on the fate of 9 of them but it is known that one did reach safety and joined the union forces.

With the house empty, the confederate troops used it as a field hospital and headquarters for most of the remainder of the civil war. The north occupied it for a short time right at the tail end.  The part of the history of the south that I was completely unfamiliar with came after the war with the formation of the Freedman's Bureau which was responsible for, among other things, selling small parcels of land to former slaves. The slave who escaped in 1862 and joined the union forces returned to the plantation and purchased land under this program.  Unfortunately the bureau was dismantled when president Johnson (who became president when Lincoln was assassinated) vetoed a bill to renew the charter for the Bureau.  With the dismantling of the Bureau, the introduction of Black Codes in the south, and the rise of the KKK, any advances made were rolled back and the plantation land returned to the McLeod family. One wonders what things would have been like had Lincoln not been assassinated.

The slave cabins on the property eventually became homes for share croppers and were inhabited until 1990 when the last of the McLeod family died at the age of 104.  Rent at the time for the small one room cabins was $26 per month and included electricity but no running water.  One cabin was inhabited by 14 members of one family!

The original front facade of the house, it became the back door when land was sold off for a golf course and a road cut through the rear of the property making that the front entrance.

The font of the McLeod Plantation house.  This fancy columns and portico were added in the 1920s as it was deemed not grand enough when the back door became the front door.

A three hundred year old oak tree near the house. She was gorgeous.

A row of slave cabins.  I believe there were once 23 of them.  6 or 7 remain.