2006 RV - Doug & Crystal

This driveway in named the Avenue of Oaks and leads to the Boone Hall Plantation House. Boone Hall is America's oldest working plantation. Huge Spanish live oak trees line the half-mile entrance to the plantation, planted over 250 years ago by Captain Thomas Boone. Several films and motion pictures have been made on the estate, including the North and South television mini-series. The plantation estate includes a library, period antiques, and guided tours. A restaurant and gift shop are located in the cotton gin house.
Built in the early 1700s by Major John Boone, Boone Hall was originally part of a cotton plantation covering more than 17,000 acres. Two hundred years later, it was the world's largest pecan grove producer. The original estate house, cotton gin, slave cabins, smokehouse, formal gardens, and some of Charlestons' historic structures were built with brick and tile handmade on the plantation. Many of these buildings are listed on the National Register of Historic Places.


The nine original slave cabins along the Oak Avenue make up one of the very, few remaining"Slave Streets" in the Southeast. The proximity of the slave quarters along the road to The Big House and the expensive brick construction of the slave cabins indicates that Captain Thomas Boone was displaying his wealth and status to other planters as they rode up to the main house. At one time there were twenty-seven cabins, arranged in threegroups of nine cabins each. These quarters housed house servants, the elite within the plantationsystem. They also housed the skilled slaves that provided blacksmithing, carpentry, weavingsewing, cooking, and other skills that supported the plantation.On July 14, 1983, Boone Hall Plantation's nine original slave cabins, smokehouse and oak avenuewere listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Hear the Gullah dialect of how the slaves communicated and lived in their community. Live presentations of singing old spiritual Negro hymns, prayers, chants, slave cuisine (which featured okra, yams, watermelon, and benne seeds) and how slave interacted on the plantation.