Haunted Plantations Near Charleston: Ashley River Road

The haunted plantations near Charleston are three houses on one road: Drayton Hall, Magnolia Plantation, and Middleton Place, all on Ashley River Road, South Carolina Highway 61, about fifteen miles northwest of the city. Between them they were burned by an army, shaken down by an earthquake, and worked for more than a century by thousands of enslaved people whose names are only now being recovered. I am not going to tell you a ghost story about any of that. I am going to tell you what happened.

Where are the Ashley River plantations?

Driving out of Charleston on Highway 61 you reach them in order: Drayton Hall at 3380 Ashley River Road, Magnolia at 3550, and Middleton Place at 4300, which puts Middleton just over the line in Dorchester County. All three face the Ashley. A few miles further up, the river stops being tidal just below Fort Dorchester, where the colony’s first inland town was founded in 1696 or 1697 (sources differ) and abandoned after the Revolution. The plantations were built downstream of that town and in its shadow; Dorchester was the market town for the upper river. Colonial Dorchester State Historic Site, at 300 State Park Road in Summerville, is the far end of this same drive, open daily from nine, three dollars for adults.

Drayton Hall

John Drayton bought the land in 1738. The house went up between 1747 and 1752 by the current evidence, which comes from a 2014 analysis of the attic timbers; the older belief was that building started in 1738. It is a Palladian house, the west portico modeled on Villa Cornaro near Venice. It is the only plantation house on the Ashley to come through both the Revolution and the Civil War intact. The 1886 earthquake destroyed the laundry house. An 1893 hurricane took the kitchen. Seven generations of Draytons held it, and families lived on the property, farming and keeping it up, until 1960. It is a site of the National Trust for Historic Preservation now.

John Drayton owned more than a hundred plantations, about 76,000 acres, and the number of people he held in bondage was likely in the thousands. The 630-acre site at Drayton Hall once held thirteen cabins housing about seventy-eight enslaved people. The diary of his son Charles names a few: Toby and Quash, carpenters; Dumplin, a cook; George, a bustler, in the diary’s word. After emancipation the Lowcountry’s main industry until the 1920s was phosphate mining, and it ran on the labor of freedmen. Drayton Hall was never abandoned.

Open Wednesday through Monday, 9 to 4:30; the gate closes at 3; closed Tuesdays; the gate does not take cash. Ticket prices are on the Trust’s site.

Magnolia Plantation and Gardens

The Draytons again. Thomas and Ann Drayton built a house and a small formal garden here in 1679, with enslaved people brought from Barbados in the 1670s. The gardens that draw the crowds were the work of the Rev. John Grimké Drayton, an Episcopal minister who inherited the place in the 1840s. The main house burned in the Civil War, likely at the hands of Union troops. Its oldest surviving section was built near Summerville before the Revolution and moved down the Ashley after the war to be joined to the rebuilt house. The swamp garden is named for John James Audubon, who visited before the war.

Five cabins stand on the grounds; four were built during slavery and one around 1900. They are the center of a tour called “From Slavery to Freedom,” which is the plainest thing on the property and the one to take. Enslaved Africans here worked in large gangs, and the record of their numbers is incomplete.

3550 Ashley River Road. Open daily except Thanksgiving and Christmas; admission is charged and hours and prices are posted on Magnolia’s own schedule page.

Middleton Place

Henry Middleton married Mary Williams in January 1741, and the house her father John Williams had begun came to him in the dowry. He laid out the gardens that year; they are the oldest landscaped gardens in the country by the site’s own claim, sixty-five acres of them, and a French botanist named André Michaux brought the first camellias in an American garden here. His son Arthur, born here, signed the Declaration of Independence. Williams Middleton inherited in 1846 and turned the place toward rice.

On February 22, 1865, Union troops of the 56th New York ransacked the main house and its flankers and burned them. The earthquake of August 31, 1886, whose zone of worst damage was centered roughly on this property, toppled what was left of the main house and the north flanker and tore up the gardens. Williams’s widow Susan repaired the south flanker, which survives. The Middleton Place Foundation took the historic district from the family’s descendants in the early 1970s; it was named a National Historic Landmark in November 1971.

The Foundation spent ten years on a research project that identified more than 2,800 people enslaved by the Middletons between 1738 and 1865. Henry Middleton alone at one point held 800 people across some twenty plantations and 50,000 acres. Eliza’s House, a freedman’s dwelling built around 1870 and named for its last occupant, Eliza Leach, who lived from 1891 to 1986, holds a permanent exhibit on seven generations of those families. The Foundation’s book and documentary from the same work name people: Moro Brewer, Annette Mayes, members of Mary Izard’s household.

4300 Ashley River Road; daily programs on the lives of enslaved and free people at the site. Hours and tickets are on the Foundation’s site.

Are the Ashley River plantations haunted?

I have read the tour-company pages and they do not say much about this road; their lists stay on the peninsula. What is documented on Ashley River Road is this: one house burned by the 56th New York and shaken down the rest of the way twenty-one years later; one house burned and rebuilt around a piece of itself brought down from Summerville; one house that stood through everything with its laundry gone. And under all three, a record of 2,800 names at one property alone, still being assembled. If you want to walk a haunted plantation near Charleston, go in daylight, take the cabin tour, and read the names. That is the whole of what I have to offer on the question.

The dispatches pick up a few miles upriver, where the tide quits. The county map at /map/ runs the whole length of Highway 61. The county history at /history/ starts at Dorchester. And /the-tower-with-no-bell/ is about what the town upriver of these three houses left standing.

Haunted Plantations Near Charleston: What Actually Happened on Ashley River Road