Former Plantations are Not Amusement Parks for Tourists
You mean you can’t order a Mint Julep or play at picking cotton? Geez. Why bother going?
My husband and I moved from to the South a few years ago. A genteel real estate agent sold us a big, beautiful house on the edge of a golf course. Now that we lived in a Deep South State, a couple of friends from California, with nothing to do over the Memorial Day weekend, wanted to visit us.
Seeing them again was fun, but they did not want to sit around and sip Sweet Tea. We braved the heat and soup-like humidity to take them all around Charlotte: to the Nascar Museum, Museum of Aviation, Billy Graham Library, Reed Gold Mine, and other touristy things I can’t recall because my head was spinning at the end of two days of this madness.
But there was still a day to get through. “What about seeing a real plantation?” my friend asked. I knew what she had in mind: Tara, sweeping skirts, grand staircases, stately columns, Mint Juleps on the verandah. Obligingly, I Googled for plantations open to the public.
The big ones — popular venues for weddings and other festive affairs — were too far away, already booked for events, or otherwise closed to tourists. But I found a ‘working plantation’ a few miles from us that offered guided tours…
