Kumbaya.......Come By Here

Approach to Boone Hall

As many people know, it's the 150th anniversary of the Civil War on April 12. Being in Charleston there is a lot of historical activities going on.
You can go broke trying going to all the different houses, plantation, prisons ,etc. that abound here.  We've been here for several months and decided to go to Boone Hall Plantation which is only a few miles from where we are docked.  


 It is a quintessential looking plantation: long oak lined drive leading up to the stately red brick mansion surrounded by beautiful gardens. While this is what we all think a southern plantation looks like, that is not the case.  The current house is actually the 3rd house that was built.  The first two houses were wooden farm houses, and not particularly fancy; the first one was lost in a hurricane, the second one was lost in a fire and the third one (current) was built in the 1930's.

Boone Hall

But beyond the brick wall enclosing the plantation are the slaves' cabins, small, one-roomed, and unheated. The ones closest to the house are the "nice" ones where the house servants (not the field workers)live, so they have a fireplace, windows (no glass), and wood floors. The field workers' houses were smaller, made of wood, no windows, no fireplace, dirt floors, and you had to live near the fields where you worked everyday from sunup to sundown.

Original Slave Cabins

Made of Brick Produced at Boone Hall

Boone Hall began as a cotton plantation, then it was pecans and finally brick, with the slaves doing all the work.  It wasn't common to build slave quarters out of brick but since the bricks were produced here, the slaves that served in the plantation house had brick houses.  Lucky for us that they did, because the field workers' houses that were made out of wood are gone, while these still stand.  One million bricks were produced at Boone Hall. The bricks that were made here were also used to build Fort Sumter.


Kumbaya is gullah for "come by here".  The Gullah people are mix of people that were brought to the southeast coast of the U.S. (pre-civil war) for the slave trade, most were from West Africa.  The name Gullah is roughly taken from the name Angola (a country) in Western Africa.  The language that they speak is a mix of all the different languages and dialects that the people spoke when they were brought here, including some Dutch influence. 

When slaves lived on a plantation, they belonged to the plantation owner.  If two slaves wanted to get married, they performed a "jump the broom" ceremony and whoever landed on the other side first, was the "boss".   However, if the plantation owner decided to sell one of them to another plantation, that slave would be separated from their family forever.  While historically, the life people led on a plantation is very fascinating, the actuality of it is still horrific.