Brookgreen Gardens

Brookgreen Gardens sits on four former rice plantations where the largest slaveholder in America forced over a thousand enslaved laborers to produce nearly four million pounds of rice per year. A barn with bloodstains that could not be scrubbed away was the first thing demolished when the property became a sculpture garden, and visitors still see figures laboring in the rice fields at dusk.

The first thing Archer Huntington did when he bought Brookgreen Plantation in 1930 was tear down the barn. The bloodstains inside had outlasted the Civil War, outlasted Reconstruction, outlasted every attempt to scrub or stomp them away. They kept coming back. An overseer named Fraser had used that barn during the antebellum years to bind and beat enslaved workers, and sympathizers eventually reported his brutality to the plantation's owner, Joshua John Ward. After emancipation, freed people tried to hunt Fraser down. He was never found. But his marks on the barn floor refused to fade, visible for decades until Huntington demolished the structure entirely.

Joshua John Ward was the largest slaveholder in America at the time of his death in 1853. His plantations on the Waccamaw Neck, including Brookgreen, produced 3.9 million pounds of rice per year, cultivated by 1,092 enslaved laborers. The current gardens sit on four former rice plantations: The Oaks, Brookgreen, Springfield, and Laurel Hill. When the Huntingtons opened the site as a public sculpture garden in 1932, the first in America, they layered art over soil that had absorbed a particular kind of suffering for more than a century.

Visitors walking the paths at dusk have seen figures in the former rice fields, bent over in labor the way workers would have been in the 1840s. Singing and chanting carry across the marshes in the evening, coming from the direction of the former quarters. Some areas of the property produce sharp temperature drops with no obvious cause, particularly near the remains of old plantation structures.

The most famous ghost tied to the property isn't an enslaved laborer but a former first lady of South Carolina. Theodosia Burr Alston, daughter of Vice President Aaron Burr, married Joseph Alston, who owned The Oaks Plantation, now part of Brookgreen Gardens. Theodosia never adjusted well to life on the Georgetown County plantation. In 1812, after her young son died of malaria, she boarded a schooner called the Patriot on New Year's Eve, heading to New York to see her father. The ship vanished. No wreckage was ever found, and the most common theory blames pirates off the North Carolina coast. In 1821, a portrait of an unknown woman turned up in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, said to have been salvaged from a shipwreck. It was later identified as Theodosia.

Her ghost has been seen around the rice fields of the former Oaks Plantation, dressed in gray, and on foggy nights at Huntington Beach and Debordieu, floating above the waves, still trying to reach New York.

The gardens today hold more than 2,000 works of sculpture across 9,100 acres that include a wildlife preserve and a lowcountry history trail. Anna Hyatt Huntington, who built Atalaya Castle across the highway, created many of the pieces on display. The sculpture garden is beautiful, carefully tended, and peaceful during the day. After sunset, when the tour groups have gone and the marsh sounds take over, the property reverts to something older than the art. The rice fields are empty, but the work goes on.