Preservation today offers provocative questions about the value of creating monuments to wealth, power and fashion. Instead alternatives present time as a continuum and not simply a period, and consider history as something that is not owned but shared by all.
At Drayton Hall Plantation outside Charleston centuries of paint and furnishings are stripped away. The empty rooms become more memorial than museum. Without the distractions of furnishings and personal memorabilia, the mind wanders through history to a time when fields of slaves and tobacco supported a family home. The home becomes haunted by one’s own reflections on time’s passage and the ghosts of southern history.
Was one of the family a signer of the Dec. Of independence?
Living three miles down Highway 61, William Henry Drayton’s neighbor, Arthur Middleton appears to have signed the Declaration while residing at his family plantation at Middleton Place where he lies buried. Together with Drayton, his sister’s brother-in-law, he designed the state seal of South Carolina. Both Middleton and Drayton were members of the Continental Congress. Visiting both plantations is easy in a day.