Charleston, SC – We’re digesting a delicious supper of local seafood that we enjoyed at the SeeWee Restaurant down the way from our campground. I had “she-crab soup” to start with plus grilled flounder, fried okra, fried green tomatoes and red rice. Val went for crab cakes and grilled shrimp, and we ate in a refurbished general store complete with creaky wooden floors and shelves still lined with canned goods from the olden days.
It’s been a full day, starting with a boat trip into the Charleston harbour to see Fort Sumter, where the first shots were fired that started the Civil War in 1861. The formidable structure that existed at that time had walls that rose 50 feet from the water, but now they are one-third that height. The fort was built in a pentagonal shape on a sand bar in the harbour, with rocks and bricks shipped in from the north. Massive cannons are still in place, pointing outward to sea through openings in the fortress walls. The museum displays explained the evolution of cannons and cannon balls from smooth tubes and round balls to striated tubes and ammunition shaped more like bullets which could travel more than three miles before landing.
I was glad of my jacket as we sailed to and from the fort, but the day was beautiful and sunny. It was great to see the skyline of Charleston from the water, with its many tall church steeples, and to glimpse dolphins out on the water again today.
We grabbed a quick sandwich when we got back to shore, and headed northeast of the town to Drayton Hall, the oldest unrestored plantation house in America in “near-original condition”. The driveway in reminded me of the opening scenes of Gone with the Wind, with huge live oaks arching over the road and framing the large brick mansion in the distance.
Betsy, one of the Drayton Hall guides, gave us a glimpse into the lives of the enslaved people who were kidnaped from Africa, stowed in fetid holds of ships that took weeks to reach Charleston, held in “pest houses” outside the town under quarantine (if they survived the crossing) until healthy enough to be auctioned off to plantation owners, where they would spend the rest of their short lives labouring in rice fields, processing indigo, making bricks or performing other tasks.
The Drayton family built the plantation house in about 1738, setting out three floors with drawing rooms, a library, a ballroom and bedrooms upstairs, paneled in wood and decorated with ornate plaster ceilings in the front rooms and a gracious staircase with mahogany banisters just inside the front door. It took some imagining to visualize the mansion in its heyday, because the rooms were all vacant and the paint on the wooden walls was worn thin. Our guide encouraged visitors to become friends of Drayton Hall with an annual membership fee that would help the plantation’s curators maintain the site.
On the way out, near the gates, we stopped so I could visit one of the oldest documented African-American cemeteries still in use, with a wrought iron archway that reads “Let ‘Em Rest”, a title suggested by the descendent of one of the Drayton Hall slaves, who worked there as a gatekeeper.
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