Middleton Place welcomes you, home to the oldest landscaped gardens in America, begun in 1741. Henry Middleton, who would later serve as President of the First Continental Congress, set one hundred enslaved people to work for a decade reshaping the landscape — cutting terraces, digging ornamental lakes, planting the great camellia allées — to create gardens modeled on the formal European style of the period. His son Arthur Middleton signed the Declaration of Independence; his grandson Henry Middleton served as governor of South Carolina and ambassador to Russia.
The family accumulated vast wealth through rice and later cotton, all of it produced by enslaved labor on a scale that is difficult to comprehend. At the time of the Civil War, the family enslaved nearly 900 people. Union troops burned the main house in 1865; only a flanking building survives as the current house museum.
What endures with particular power here is Eliza's House, a small brick building where enslaved workers lived, preserved and interpreted by the site. The gardens, which require enormous ongoing maintenance, have been restored to something like their historic condition. But Middleton Place today insists on telling both stories: the beautiful gardens and the labor that built and maintains them.
Both are real. Both are here.