This is the 11th installment of Post & Courier columnist Brian Hicks’ celebration of the 350th anniversary of Charleston’s founding.
“John Williams started building his grand country home on the Ashley River in the late 1730s.
The house, which would come to be called Middleton Place, was just upstream from land John Drayton Sr. had secured to build his own Drayton Hall — because it was clear he was not destined to inherit his birthplace, nearby Magnolia Plantation.
As Robert Rosen writes in “A Short History of Charleston,” the early years of Charles Town’s time as a British colony were a golden age for the proliferation of plantations — Snee Farm and Fenwick Hall among them. The rice market was thriving, and many planters and merchants were enjoying an economic boon.”