Back from Charleston and would highly recommend for anyone that visits the area. Focus is taken completely away from the "big house" and, while you can tour it, even the inside of the home is told almost completely from the viewpoint of the enslaved workers who were there. Some of the structures that housed the workers remarkably still stand.
The farm was started before our Civil War and the grandson of the original owner was born in the 1880s. He lived to be 105 and still lived in the big house at the time of his death. Amazingly, some of the descendants of the enslaved workers still lived in those same "cabins" on the property in the 1990s until the death of the owner. He had no heirs at all.
Apparently, this site is one of only two in the US where the emphasis of all tours and history of the grounds is structured from the point of view of the workers and not the landowners. The other is in Louisiana and I can get the name for anyone who's interested. I had no idea about this but, directly after the war, the land was turned over to the people who had worked it and the owners were completely barred from the grounds. Union soldiers occupied the main house once the area fell to the north, and for a short period afterward. The group of blackfolks who were in charge of the land formed mini-garrisons that would patrol the grounds and keep the original owners from trying to take back portions of it. The information on the tour wasn't detailed enough to say how but, eventually, the government capitulated to the demands of the landowners and aided their repossession of the entire plantation and acreage. The old status quo terms of the working life of the plantation was re-instituted.
