John McMahon
1 min readDec 24, 2019

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I am a history buff and lived in the Charleston SC are for a little while, and I hate to tell you this but there is absolutely nowhere in the entire state of South Carolina where white people can get married that wasn’t worked by slaves before 1865. Nowhere. I’ve visited Boone Hall plantation, and it is lovely and very romantic. The original plantation house was replaced by a boring Colonial style mansion in the 1930s, but the grounds and the live oaks make a tremendous backdrop to a wedding. As I recall, the slave houses which were occupied by black sharecroppers until the 1940s are right out front. Actual slave houses are extremely rare in the South, and there’s nine of them at Boone Hall. Any white person who may not normally take a historical tour of an antebellum site, but is going to a fancy wedding of friends or family at Boone Hall, is going to have to reckon with those little brick houses near that big house, and I don’t think that is such a bad thing. They might even walk around them and learn something.

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