Postbellum Stories on the Land at Drayton Hall

Em Dombrovskaya, WPAMC ’24

Traveling through North and South Carolina as part of the WPAMC Southern Trip, our group visited three plantations, including Charleston’s fascinating Drayton Hall. Located in the phosphate-rich area surrounding the Ashley River, Drayton Hall is an 18th-century plantation on a 630-acre site with an imposing, Palladian-style house. In recent years, curators and researchers at Drayton Hall have given new attention to the postbellum period at the plantation in their interpretation as a means of telling more diverse and complicated stories of people connected with the plantation.

Most of this new interpretation takes place in what is known as the Caretaker’s House, built around the 1870s for a caretaker to watch over the property during the years of phosphate mining at Drayton.¹ This space tells the stories of the free Black people who lived in the house and worked on the land, some of whom were the descendants of people enslaved by the Drayton family. The emphasis on inter-generational continuity and the proximity to the African-American cemetery on site, where the people named in the interpretation are buried, helps visitors engage their historical imagination in critical ways. 

The other story told in the Caretaker’s House is of the post-Civil War phosphate mining for fertilizer production. Following the Emancipation Proclamation, the Drayton family, whose wealth came from the labor of enslaved people in South Carolina and Bermuda, leased their land to two different phosphate mining operations to solve their new financial problems.² Most laborers in these mines were recently-freed Black men, who had no choice but to also lease housing from the mining companies. The annotated map in the Caretaker’s House does a good job of explaining the details of this exploitative system and how it manifested on the land as a toxic environmental practice. While there is no clear evidence that the mining operations at Drayton Hall used convict labor, the interpretation devotes a section to the racist convict leasing system in the larger phosphate mining industry, which was ushered in by the passing of the 13th Amendment. This is an impressive exhibition about a hard topic, and it was great to hear that the research for this story is ongoing. 

However, as Winterthur students, we are incredibly privileged to get personalized tours from brilliant scholars and curators when we visit a site, which means that we often have a different experience than most visitors. Most promotional materials from the Trust and visitor reviews online don’t mention the stories I’ve shared here. If someone is using the audio guide or getting a tour of the main house from a guide, how likely are they to make their way to the Caretaker’s House? I read 21 reviews online that mentioned the house, the grounds, and the gators before getting to one review that mentioned the Caretaker’s House. In the evolving interpretation of Drayton Hall, rethinking the movement of visitors through the property with an emphasis on the material in the Caretaker’s House would dramatically change how visitors engage with the site at large. 

¹ “Discoveries in the Caretaker’s House.” Drayton Hall (blog), August 25, 2017. https://www.draytonhall.org/discoveries-caretakers-house/.

² McKinley, Shepherd W. Stinking Stones and Rocks of Gold: Phosphate, Fertilizer, and Industrialization in Postbellum South Carolina. New Perspectives on the History of the South. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2014. P. 62.