If you plan to visit several attractions in Charleston and plan to spend more than 1 day in the city, this pass will likely save you some money. We recommend that any first-time visitor check this one out. There is also the Heritage Pass which covers a total of 10 historical homes, plantations, and museums. However, it is not a great value for those primarily interested in visiting plantations as although it includes two Charleston plantations Drayton Hall and Middleton Place , it only grants free entry to the grounds and gardens and does not include a house tour at either.
Getting to any of the plantations will require some form of transport, as none are located within the city of Charleston. The simplest option is to bring or rent a car. This way you can visit as many plantations as you like, for as long as you like.
There are many rental agencies at the airport and in downtown Charleston, such as Enterprise. Public transit is not a convenient option for most of the Charleston plantations as there are limited bus services outside the city. Currently, it takes about 16 minutes to reach the plantation site from the Charleston Museum if you take Bus It is also possible to reach Boone Hall Plantation by taking public buses; however, it takes a long time and requires a 25 minute walk from the final bus stop.
Not recommended. If you do not wish to rent a car, taxis are an option, and there are several companies in the area such as Green Taxi. Ride share services, such as Uber, are also an option; however, be sure that you will be able to get a return ride. Some people who have used ride share services have become stranded at plantations because there were no ride options back into Charleston. If you are going far from the city center, pricing might become prohibitively expensive.
So you may want to also consider booking a day tour that includes transport and admission prices which often costs less than going by taxi. Another option is to book a day tour that visits one or more plantations, you can see a list of local tours here on Viator and here on GetYourGuide. Most tour prices include your transport, a guide, and entry into the visited plantations. Some also include lunch or a winery visit, such as this one.
For a full list of plantation day tours from Charleston, see our Charleston Plantation Tours section below. None of the plantations are located in downtown Charleston, as plantations by definition require a lot of space. However all of the plantations covered in this article are within a 45 minute drive of the city.
McLeod Plantation Historic Site is the closest plantation and can be reached by a 10 minute drive or 20 minute bus ride from downtown Charleston. Charleston Tea Garden is about a 40 minute drive away. These houses were built and lived in by the rich merchants, politicians, and plantation-owning families of antebellum Charleston. Similar to the rural plantations, most of these city mansions were run with the use of enslaved labor.
They vary in architectural styles. There are several day tours that offer round-trip transport from downtown Charleston. Just be sure to book your day tour in advance as some require you to book at least 24 hours or more before you tour date.
You can sometimes get a small discount by pre-purchasing tickets, but note that most of these tickets are non-refundable. All plantations allow you to purchase admission and tour tickets in person on arrival. If you are traveling in a larger group, we do recommend that you call ahead and see if you need to make reservations. If you do not have a reserved tour time, I would advise showing up 30 minutes or so before the tour time you want to better ensure you get your desired time as tour times do sometimes sell out.
If you have your own car, you could theoretically visit multiple plantations in a full day. However, given that most people spend 3 to 4 hours at a plantation, it is probably better to visit only one or two in a single day.
To allow visitors enough time to explore, most day tours from Charleston only visit one plantation. If you want to visit more plantations in one day, we recommend looking at the plantations situated along the Ashley River as these are the most geographically close together. It is good to keep in mind that these places are historical sites that help illustrate two very different sides of the same history, one of the wealthy plantation owners and one of the enslaved workers of these plantations.
While plantation tours can be entertaining and enjoyable, do remember that for some visitors the experience is more serious and can be emotional.
These plantations were run using generations of enslaved people and visiting can be upsetting or cathartic for their descendants and other visitors.
While all of the plantations offer wheelchair accessible toilets and the modern buildings visitor centers, cafes, shop are accessible, the real challenge is accessing the interiors of the historical buildings. Most of the Charleston plantation homes and other historical buildings are not wheelchair accessible.
The only plantation house that is currently open to wheelchair users is McLeod Plantation Historic Site. They can also sometimes do tours in a golf cart for those who are not able to walk the grounds for the tour, but they recommend contacting them in advance to be sure a staff member can accommodate.
The factory tour and gift shop at Charleston Tea Garden are wheelchair accessible. The main house at Drayton Hall is not currently wheelchair accessible, but all the other buildings are all wheelchair accessible including their museum, gallery, and slavery tour. Tour guides in most cases can not provide special assistance to guests in terms of carrying walkers or wheelchairs, assisting people up stairs during tours or walks, and it is strongly recommended that guests who need assistance visit with a companion.
For each Charleston plantation in this guide, we have an Accessibility section which provides information on wheelchair accessibility, stairs, and services for those with mobility difficulties. This information was provided to us by staff at these plantations and we do our best to keep it updated. Your info can help future travelers! It can be difficult to choose which plantation you want to visit in Charleston.
Most people only have time for one or two, and admission prices can be prohibitive to visit more than one, especially for large families. All of the plantations are worth visiting but they each offer different attractions and each has a different focus.
Which plantation you choose depends a lot on what you are looking for in a plantation experience. Magnolia Plantation is known for its well-preserved Romantic Style garden, which is designed to be an oasis away from the city. The gardens here are more wild and natural. It has stunning bridge-covered ponds and beautiful flowers.
These were our favorite gardens of the Charleston plantations. The Middleton Place Gardens also has award-winning elaborate and beautiful gardens. These classical gardens were inspired by the gardens of England and France in the 18th century.
They are widely believed to be the oldest existing landscaped gardens in the United States. Both plantations have lovely gardens, and if trying to decide between them, it depends on whether you prefer more wild gardens Magnolia or more tended and landscaped ones Middleton Place. Although all six of the plantations have large old live oaks on site, the one with the most scenic oak alley is Boone Hall.
This oak alley has been featured in films like The Notebook. McLeod Plantation Historic Site also has a notable oak alley as well as the large McLeod Oak which is believed to be at least years old. For those looking for an original plantation home, we recommend Drayton Hall.
Drayton Hall is the oldest plantation house left in Charleston, and one of few plantation houses along the Ashley River to survive intact after the Civil War. Most of the others were destroyed or have been heavily restored or reconstructed. Drayton Hall was built before the Revolutionary War and is an excellent example of Palladian architecture. It has a very impressive exterior made of brick with white columns. It has been conserved, but not restored, and has been left pretty much as it was left and is largely unfurnished inside.
This allows visitors to better see and understand the architecture and construction of the house. McLeod also has an intact antebellum Georgian style plantation house on site, although it underwent significant changes and additions in the 20th century. Like Drayton Hall, it is unfurnished inside. The main houses at Middleton Place and Magnolia Plantation were destroyed by the Union army during the Civil War, but both have Reconstruction era houses you can visit.
At Middleton Place, a restored dependency building adjacent to the main house was turned into the family home and can be visited.
Unlike antebellum plantations in some other areas of the country, such as the Louisiana plantations along the River Road , very few of the original antebellum grand plantation homes remain. All of the plantations provide some information about slavery except Charleston Tea Garden of course , and in fact each of the 5 plantations with an antebellum history offer dedicated slavery tours or talks.
But some definitely focus on it more than others. Slaves were brought over from various parts of West and Central Africa and they developed a Creole culture and language that enabled them to maintain parts of their own African cultures, traditions, and language.
As a result they were less influenced by British-American culture than slaves in some other states. It should also be noted that former slaves and their descendants continued to live and work on most of the Charleston area plantations after Emancipation and well into the mid and late 20th century.
So many plantations also present information about African American history through the 19th and 20th centuries as well. If your primary reason for visiting is to learn about slavery and African American history, we recommend visiting the McLeod Plantation Historical Site.
There is also a focus on understanding the cultivation and processing of the crops like cotton. We also recommend Boone Hall Plantation which offers daily live talks about the lives of the slaves on the plantation, a self-guided tour you can take with exhibits in the former slave cabins, and a daily live presentations about Gullah culture in their outdoor theater. That said, Magnolia Plantation, Middleton Place, and Drayton Hall also all provide tours focused on the experiences of the enslaved and African Americans.
So really it is up to you to determine how much you want to focus on learning about slavery at the plantations. If slavery and African American history tours and talks are of interest, be sure to check the daily schedule in advance at the planation you plan to visit to make sure you can fit in the tours during your visit.
In the city of Charleston, slave labor was used to built many of the houses, schools, government buildings, and churches, to do factory work, and to perform domestic duties in the homes of the wealthy. In Charleston, we recommend visiting the Old Slave Mart Museum which is a museum dedicated to sharing information about slavery. The museum is in a building which was part of a slave auction house from to The corridor runs along the coast from southern North Carolina to northern Florida.
You may also want to check out the Slave Dwelling Project , which was started by Joseph McGill who began sleeping in former slave cabins in South Carolina. The group now organizes living history programs, education, and sleepovers in slavery-associated sites across the country. There are usually several sleepovers scheduled at Magnolia each year.
Of course the best way to learn more about slavery is to read accounts by former slaves. One large source of narratives comes from the interviews from the Slave Narrative Project that were collected by writers from hundreds of former slaves by the Works Progress Administration from to You can find many of the transcripts online for free , or can buy them as a printed book online some plantation gift shops also sell copies.
We would recommend Magnolia Plantation for those who are interested in seeing nature and wildlife. In addition to the Romantic gardens, there is a nature tram tour, a boat tour, and the Audubon Swamp Garden. They also offer a specialized bird walk on Sundays led by a local ornithologist.
We personally saw several species of birds, squirrels, turtles, and alligators during our visit at Magnolia. The plantation has a number of ponds and lakes, swampland, and is next to the Ashley River so changes of seeing waterfowl and other water critters are very high.
Many of the other plantations do offer self-guided nature trails, including Middleton Place and Drayton Hall. The best plantations for those interested in seeing period furnishings, antiques, and family heirlooms from the antebellum period would be Middleton Place and Magnolia Plantation. Almost all the objects had been owned by the Middleton family, and include family portraits, Charleston rice beds, and an extensive collection of English silver.
Magnolia Plantation includes furniture, household objects, art, and antiques from the Drayton family who have owned the plantation since These objects are displayed across 10 different rooms and include portraits, quilts, and early American antiques. For anyone interested in antiques, Drayton Hall also deserves a mention here. Although the house itself is largely unfurnished, there is a collection of furnishings and artifacts from the Drayton family on display in the new Gates Gallery.
This includes a c. However, only 4 rooms on the main floor are open to the public to tour as the top two floors are being used as a private residence. Plantations tours are not always a great fit for children, especially younger children, who can have a hard time standing still or paying attention during longer tours about history, slavery, architecture, and antiques. The two plantations with the more kid-friendly offerings are Magnolia Plantation and Middleton Place.
Both also offer sandwiches and snacks on site. Middleton Place offers lots of space for kids to wander around in the gardens, farm animals, carriage rides, and craftspeople doing different crafts demonstrations such as candle making and pottery. Charleston Tea Garden offers a short video-guided factory tour and a trolley tour to see the tea plantation.
Boone Hall Plantation has gardens, a tractor tour, outdoor Gullah theater talks, and a seasonal butterfly pavilion. Charleston Tea Garden is a real working tea plantation outside Charleston. The trolley tour takes you around the fields and you get to see how tea is grown, picked, processed, and brewed.
Boone Hall is one of the oldest continuously working farms in the country, and has been producing crops for over years. They no longer commercially grow indigo or cotton, but they raise a number of fruits and vegetables including strawberries, tomatoes, pumpkins, and asparagus.
Visitors can take a tractor tour to explore the farm at Boone Hall and learn both about the historical workings of the plantation as well as the current farming operations. Fresh produce is available to purchase at the Boone Hall Farms Market near the plantation.
At certain times of the year, visitors can even pick their own basket of fruit as part of the U-Pick-Em business. Although no longer a working plantation, McLeod Plantation offers tours about Sea Island cotton cultivation and processing. They also started growing a small amount of Sea Island cotton on the property in for educational purposes. Four of the plantations offer food on site. Magnolia Plantation and Drayton Hall both have casual on-site cafes where you can get sandwiches and hot food.
Boone Hall has a small cafe with sandwiches, snacks, ice cream, and drinks. There is also a cafe at Boone Farms Market located a 5 minute drive away which has more hot food and meal options. Middleton Place Plantation has both a casual cafe and more formal sit-down restaurant.
The casual garden cafe offers sandwiches, snacks, and ice cream. The Middleton Place restaurant serves seasonal, local Lowcountry cuisine.
Reservations are recommended for dinner. Neither McLeod Plantation or Charleston Tea Garden offer food, although Charleston offers free tea tastings and both sell snacks in their respective gift shops. Only one of the plantations, Middleton Place, offers on site accommodation. Despite having 55 rooms, it can book up quickly so plan ahead and book online.
Charleston has many options ranging from budget hotels to 5-star ones. We will break up the choices into options in central Charleston, and ones that are a little further out near some of the plantations. If you are looking for a room or apartment, then we recommend Plum Guide. Plum Guide carefully curate their listings so their options tend to be of a very high quality whilst still being available at a range of price points. See their listings for Charleston here. You can save some money by staying outside of central Charleston, such as in Mount Pleasant, near the airport, or in Summerville.
This is only recommended for those with cars as it can be difficult getting around without a car outside of the city. Each plantation has its own website that will offer all you need to know about admission prices, tour times, whether tickets can be booked in advance, closure dates, restaurant openings, contact information, etc. For more trip planning information check out our suggested 2 day Charleston itinerary and the local Charleston official tourism website.
If you are traveling elsewhere in the Southeast, you might also want to take a look at our suggested Deep South road trip itinerary. Charleston is full of interesting historical and cultural attractions. A few possibilities include:. To help you start planning your time in Charleston, take a look at our suggested 2 day Charleston itinerary.
We have the full run down on the six major plantations near Charleston. We focus on those that are open year-round to the public, offer regular tours and other tourist services, and are of greatest interest to visitors. Do note that there are other plantations in and around Charleston. Many of these are either private residences or being used as private hire wedding and event spaces such as Lowndes Grove Plantation.
But there are other plantation houses and plantation historic sites worth visiting that are open to the public and most are run by state, federal, or city government entities. These sites offer fewer tourist services but are recommended for those with greater interest and more time to explore plantations in the area. Below is a map of the Charleston plantations. You can click here or click on the map photo below to see or interact with the detailed map.
Now, we take a detailed look at each of the six Charleston plantations, listed in no particular order:. Magnolia Plantation is one of the most visited plantations near Charleston. It was founded in by the Drayton Family, making it one of the oldest plantations in the country. Rice was the primary crop grown here and it was one of the first rice plantations along the Ashley River.
The plantation is still owned by the Drayton family who have maintained the plantation through wars and natural disasters. The original house was ransacked by the British but survived the Revolutionary War. During the Civil War, Union troops set fire to the second house here in , burning it to the ground. He created a series of romantic gardens while recovering from tuberculosis to help his new wife Julia from Philadelphia feel more at home. Today these Romantic-style gardens are the oldest unrestored gardens in the country, best known for their large collection of camellias.
In addition to the Romantic gardens, there is also the Audubon Swamp Garden, where visitors have a good chance to see lots of waterfowl, including egrets and herons, turtles, frogs, and alligators. Magnolia is the plantation near Charleston that has been open the longest as a tourist attraction and it offers a wide and varied set of tours and attractions.
This original house was struck by lightning and burned down in The second house completed in was burned by the Union troops in during the Civil War. Part of the house is believed to be from a pre-Revolutionary War hunting lodge owned by the Draytons in Summerville that was floated downriver to the current location.
Architectural Style: It is believed that the original home was a large brick Georgian mansion and the second house was a 2-storey farmhouse. The current house has various architectural style influences including Victorian and Queen Anne style.
Main Cash Crop: Rice Working plantation today? The Drayton family lived in the current main house until There are also Sunday bird walks. Tour guides do not wear period costumes. Located on the scenic banks of the Black River about four miles from downtown Georgetown, Mansfield Plantation is a beautifully preserved antebellum rice plantation covering almost 1, acres of rice fields, pine forest, and cypress swamps.
It was once one of the best rice producing plantations in America. Today, Mansfield Plantation is carefully preserved as an original rice plantation with the historic plantation home, a schoolhouse, live oak avenue, chapel, guest house, and gardens. It has the only still standing winnowing rice processing barn in Georgetown County. This acre cotton plantation witnessed many historic events in its history.
In , General Sir Henry Clinton used the original house as his headquarters as he was planning the siege of Charleston.
During the Civil War, the plantation was used by Confederate forces and as a hospital. In , the house was occupied by African American soldiers from the 55th Massachusetts Volunteer Regiments. The existing plantation house was built in in the Georgian style.
There are also six clapboard slave cabins, a dairy building, a kitchen, a barn, a gin house for cotton, and a carriage house. The plantation is considered an important Gullah heritage site preserved in recognition of its historical and cultural significance. There are minute guided tours through the plantation.
The plantation was built in a few phases during the 18th and 19th centuries, and it was home to several generations of the Middleton family. Today the plantation is a National Historic Landmark District and serves as a museum.
Most of the original house was burned toward the end of the Civil War, and much was destroyed in the earthquake. Part of the plantation is the oldest landscaped garden in the country, and it follows the symmetry of 17th century European design.
The garden is divided into parterres, sculpted terraces, and reflection pools with swans, surrounded by blooming camellias and azaleas. The plantation house is considered one of the best examples of Greek revival style of residential architecture in the States. It was built in on acres for John L. Manning and his wife. Located in a remote location difficult to access, the house is surprisingly imposing, with six massive carved Corinthian columns on granite bases.
The walls are two feet thick and made of brick. Beautifully restored, the mansion is surrounded by an extensive garden with live oaks, cedars, pines, and magnolias dripping with Spanish moss. The last owner, Richard Hampton Jenrette, restored the house to its former glory in and donated it in to the Classical American Homes Preservation Trust. The plantation mansion is decorated with original Duncan Phyfe furniture and precious artworks and is open to the public.
The plantation is recognized as a National Historic Landmark. The plantation is today open to the public. The opulent, beautifully restored Greek revival plantation house is now a house museum with original furniture and more than 4, artifacts. Visitors can have a guided tour of the mansion, two slave cabins, and magnificent lane of magnolia trees planted in Top sights, 4 day road trip map, weather, 24 hour restaurants, 48 hours in, cheapest good restaurants for families with dogs, beaches near me, directions, events, spa resorts, elevation, summer, nice pools, healthy, romantic restaurants, forest, buffet, city, tree, dinner, rentals, tent, flight, upscale, under water, pools: New Jersey Breweries Dog friendly beaches NJ , Tennessee Resorts , Largest Cities in Tennessee , Holiday Trips , Bluffton , Best Missouri Resorts Roper, a prominent local cotton planter.
It was constructed on High Battery, with spectacular views of the Charleston harbor. The house is a fine example of the 19th Century Greek revival style, in contrast to most of Charleston architecture of the time, which was dominated by the 18th century Georgian style. You might not want to use Charleston as your example. The city burned for reasons having nothing to do with the war. What was left of Charleston was largely depopulated by a yellow fever epidemic.
There wasn't a whole lot left of the city when the long Union blockade began. All of this is detailed in the history of the city. A merican C ivil W ar F orum. What would the average Southern plantation owner have left after the devast Reconstruction - The Aftermath of the War. Many of the plantations that did survive the war were stolen by the carpetbagger government. The Burge Plantation is still in existence today. Rhea Cole. The Reckoning of South Carolina.
I really wonder what really happened to the rich plantation owners after t Flora Cooke Stuart: Widow of the South. After the Emancipation Proclamation what would the average former slave hav What if the South had taken Culp's Hill at Gettysburg? More "progress" from the left. Can anyone identify this red scabbard in the far left of the picture? Can you tell me who the man seated in front row on the far left second fro Why did the South support slavery if most Southerners did not own slaves?
What did Southern leaders have to say about the reason for secession? By entering this site you declare you read and agreed to the Site Terms , acknowledged our Privacy Policy and you understand that your use of the site's content is made at your own risk and responsibility.
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