Slaves built most of the pre-Civil War churches in Charleston, and many of the bricks came from Boone Hall Plantation. But let’s look at the situation in a practical sense. Boone Hall is still a working farm, but in Mount Pleasant that land is a lot more valuable as a subdivision, a shopping center, a golf course resort, or another industrial plant like Honda or Boeing. Tourism and big events like weddings allow the plantation to exist in its present form, and I think that there is an educational value in maintaining that.

I have been to some nice outdoor weddings in the South at old properties that did not have the word “plantation” in the title or any mention of having been a plantation, but that certainly had been worked by and lived in by slave labor in antebellum times. They had knocked the slave housing down long ago, because it was a reminder of the ugliness that happened there. It happened at Monticello. I think that’s called “Sweeping it under the rug.”