From Rose Hill to Brattonsville
By Tom Poland
Faulkner was right. The past is not past. It’s hiding.
Travel some backroads, and if you know where to look, you can find it.
I did one cool Saturday in February. My journey unearthed some of South Carolina’s past, a past that’s given us so much history, a history being further examined.
I traveled to Rose Hill Plantation State Historic Site and Historic Brattonsville, places that draw back the curtains on a past overlooked by many. Interpreters Nathan and Sara Johnson guided me back to a time seen through a lens called history.
I could not have been in better hands. I saw the past up close.
When you turn off Sardis Road into Rose Hill Plantation, look uphill through old magnolias and you’ll see a plantation home. Closer in, you’ll walk past a 160-year-old rose bush, a glorious thing abloom, a garland of pink roses amid jungle-like greenery. Rose Hill, indeed. You’ll see a log cabin, freestanding kitchen, and tenant home too. More than that, you’ll see the past.
Park Manager Nathan “Nate” Johnson, in his forest green, gleaming brass South Carolina State Park Service uniform, brings protocol to Rose Hill Plantation State Historic Site. Before coming to Rose Hill, Nate was a ranger with the National Park Service at the homes of Frederick Douglass, Mary McLeod Bethune, and Carter G. Woodson, a fine provenance.
Johnson, proudly wearing his ranger’s hat, delivers a synopsis. “By 1860, Rose Hill was a 2,000-acre cotton plantation. Today, the South Carolina State Park Service protects a 44-acre site at the center of the former plantation. The U.S. Forest Service administers the remaining acreage as part of Sumter National Forest.”
I look around and see thick forests in all directions, but I know that beneath the leaves and among the roots of oaks, walnuts, and pines lies soil where cotton once grew. Nate continues, “As many as 178 people were enslaved at Rose Hill by 1860, making it one of the largest enslaved communities in Union District.”
This history of cotton, slavery, and the plantation’s grandeur resurrect the antebellum era for many, but Johnson knows there’s more to Rose Hill than that. “The site contains significant resources besides the main house. Many of the site’s significant stories happened after the Civil War.”
To make his point, he brings up post-Civil War times. “Reconstruction is a richly documented period in Rose Hill’s history that sheds light on the hopes, dreams, needs, and expectations of freedpeople. Labor contracts, censuses, voter registrations, court testimonies, school and church records, and militia enrollments are some of the documents we rely on to tell the story of Reconstruction at Rose Hill.”
Some know Rose Hill as the home of “Secession Governor,” William Henry Gist, the 68th governor of South Carolina from 1858 to 1860. A leader of the secession movement, he signed the Ordinance of Secession Dec. 20, 1860, breathing official life into the Confederacy. That’s the narrative many are familiar with but history is multifaceted and Rose Hill is no exception.
Johnson’s mission is to tell lesser-known Rose Hill stories. Walking the sloping hilltop he explains. “Oral histories from former sharecroppers and tenant families who once lived on the plantation have helped us gain insight into the history of Rose Hill during the early 1900s. Their memories bring to life the landscape, buildings, roadbeds, and archaeological sites around the former plantation. We share their memories with visitors so they feel connected to the site’s history and understand its significance.”
I’ve been to Rose Hill twice. I imagine that time when fields of white and green surrounded it. Back then, folks could see clear down to the Tyger River.
The past Faulkner referred to hides here but there’s a plan to unearth some of it. Said Johnson, “Archaeology will help us discover more about the past at Rose Hill. We’re preparing for an archaeological survey of the entire 44-acre historic site. Findings from the survey and other projects will provide valuable information that can be incorporated into the site’s reinterpretation.”
Ruins of tenant houses line an old roadbed. “By studying these remains and conducting oral histories with people who once lived in these tenant houses, we are gaining a deeper understanding of the changing landscape and evolving history of the site,” said Johnson.
For the last 70 years, people have interpreted Rose Hill as a secessionist movement shrine or a window into the lifestyle of an Upstate planter family. Change is coming.
“A recent plan for reinterpretation aims to reinvigorate the site and help it grow,” said Johnson. “Through community outreach, oral history documentation, in-depth research, and archaeological investigations, the South Carolina State Park Service is engaging the public with difficult, yet significant, histories: slavery, Reconstruction, racial violence and terrorism, and the continuous struggle in South Carolina to define freedom, equality, and citizenship.”
To see Rose Hill Plantation is to glimpse another time … Family records tucked into an old Bible. Neck collars resting on a handsome trunk. An old tin tub where folks bathed … the L. Rickets Baltimore piano in the ballroom merits a look. Close your eyes and imagine stately dancing to a minuet from an earlier century, for surely they did.
Then there’s the four-poster bed where Gist and the First Lady slept. See the portrait of distant cousin Belle Culp, hair parted down the middle like Alfalfa. Walk into the freestanding kitchen out back … see its spacious twelve-tiered brick fireplace where cooking took place. In a tenant home out back in dim light you’ll see where someone pasted newspaper to the wall to keep out the cold.
Look closely and you’ll see a word, “cotton.” Check out the old log cabin where someone patched its wood with mortar. Step back and see what looks like eye of a gator in the woodwork. The imagination gets a workout here.
Johnson said Rose Hill’s visitors enjoy the site’s stories. “The site has a long and difficult history that helps us understand the struggle in South Carolina to define freedom, citizenship, and equality. We tell those stories through the perspectives of the Gists, enslaved people, freedpeople, sharecroppers and tenant farmers, as well as their contemporaries. It’s powerful to engage with history where it actually happened.”