Former Plantations Are Not Amusement Parks for Tourists

You can’t order a Mint Julep or play at picking cotton? Geez. Why bother going?

Photo by the author

My husband and I moved from California 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 come and visit us.

Seeing them again was fun, but they were not the sort to sit around LL DAY 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 wedding venues 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…