A bit of background

The Huntingtons set sail for the West Indies in 1930, originally departing from their home in Connecticut, and they stopped at the port at Georgetown, South Carolina for supplies. During that visit they acquired four conjoined rice plantations: Brookgreen, Laurel Hill, The Oaks and Springfield.

Archer Milton Huntington was the stepson of Collis P. Huntington, a transportation tycoon who built the Southern Pacific Railway and ran several steamship lines. He was one of America’s 12 richest men, and money was no object in the creation of Atalaya and Brookgreen Gardens.

Archer brought in Atalaya’s construction materials during the Great Depression via the railroad dock in Georgetown. From there they traveled up the Waccamaw River by tugboat, first-class passage for first-class merchandise.

The Huntingtons were far too cosmopolitan to even consider this untamed wilderness as a possible permanent full-time residence. They were interested in creating a southern refuge they could retreat to during the winter months, where the beach was close at hand, where Anna could continue to recover from tuberculosis, and where they could design and landscape a natural setting suitable for Anna’s sculpture.

Tales of visits from the rich and powerful abound in connection with Atalaya, but despite fabulous luxury and titillating amusements the couple stopped coming every summer and showed up less and less often as they grew older. Their last stay in their grand castle was sometime in the late 1940s. After Archer’s death, all the furniture and art were moved to their northern home.

Archer died in 1955 at age 86, and Anna died in 1973 at age 98. Her sculptures have been all over the world, almost as well-traveled as the sculptress herself. Today Atalaya is open to the public during the summer season, and hosts arts and crafts shows in the spring and fall.

Before the Huntingtons

The rice plantations have some pretty good back stories too.

Gabriel Marion owned Laurel Hill Plantation, and he was the nephew of Revolutionary War General Francis Marion, the so-called the father of guerilla war tactics, known in his day as the Swamp Fox. The 1950s TV series of that name starred Leslie Nielsen.

William Alston (1728-1781) owned Brookgreen Plantation. He was a captain under General Francis Marion during the Revolutionary War and his son Washington was a well-known artist.

The pedigree of Springfield Plantation is not quite so clear-cut, but documents show that Washington Alston inherited a tract called Spring which is believed to be part of the Springfield Plantation.

Joseph Alston owned The Oaks, and the Alston name is all over the upper echelons of South Carolina society. Joseph Alston’s namesake grandson was the governor of South Carolina when he married Theodosia Burr, Aaron Burr’s daughter. Aaron Burr, the third vice president of the United States under Thomas Jefferson, challenged Alexander Hamilton to a duel for reasons that are not well understood. Burr shot and killed Hamilton, and fled to New York City to avoid prosecution.

Theodosia planned to smuggle him out of the country and accompany him to France. Alston booked passage for her to New York, but mysteriously she never arrived. Maybe her ship sank or maybe it was attacked by pirates. Coastal residents from the Grand Strand to Bald Head Island, North Carolina claim to see her ghost on the beach at night, throwing herself into the waves to escape her captors.

The prominent plantation owners of this region organized themselves as the prestigious South Carolina Society, also known as Winyah Indigo Society. It had yet another name, the Convivial Society in 1740, when it was chartered by King George II in 1758. The Winyah Indigo Society Hall is still a landmark at the corner of Prince and Cannon streets in Georgetown, headquarters of planters that spearheaded the building of a school and a library. The inscription on the historical marker reads as follows:

“Springing from the fervor for indigo, the colony’s vital new crop for making blue dye, the Winyah Indigo Society was begun in 1755 and incorporated 1757 to ensure stronger financial support for the free school which it had founded. Thomas Lynch was then president of the society, which also maintained a library and served as an intellectual center. The 1857 building here was used by Union forces during the Civil War.”

A sculpture showcase

While Archer built his castle, he gave his wife ten million dollars to bring to life her vision of a sculpture garden. Anna sketched her preliminary landscape design in a butterfly shape. Certain features of the old Brookgreen Plantation she kept intact, in keeping with her announcement that she wished to retain the flavor of an 18th-century rice plantation. She retained the oak-lined avenue and she refurbished an old kitchen created and used by Joshua John Ward.

Now here was another interesting tidbit of history, and the Huntingtons were always hugely in favor of that. Ward was born at Brookgreen in 1800, and discovered big-grain rice, a high-yield strain. In 1840 he used seed from one single ear to yield 49 bushels of “clean rice.” The following year it was 1,170 bushels, and it increased exponentially from there. His biggest yield came in 1850, when he produced 3,900,000 pounds of rice, the largest yield in the district.

This achievement was not without its major drawbacks. Ward was one of the largest slave holders in the region with more than 1,000 slaves, and he was known to be a cruel task master. For example, he did not allow women to straighten up as they bent over, from the beginning to the end of a row.

The kitchen garden still contained boxwoods that dated back to the Wards, and in the area now known as Live Oak Allee 300-year-old live oak trees tower over plants, walkways and statuary, planted back in the 1700s long before the dark days of Joshua John Ward.

Bucking the trends

Anna launched a search for a skilled gardener, and she found Frank G. Tarbox through Clemson University. Tarbox was utterly devoted to native plants despite a horticultural trend increasingly devoted to importing rare and exotic plants from all parts of the globe. His concern was not about plant diseases and invasive plant species; but that native plant species simply thrive the best in their native soil, already well adapted to South Carolina sunshine and rainfall.

Tarbox searched the woods for prime specimens to add to his garden, and in the process encountered wild boars and deer in the forest and alligators in the marshlands. Anna went about sculpting and curating the statues that would reside among Tarbox’s plantings, and she molded her collection to suit the type of figurative, realistic sculpture of the animal and human forms that she herself created.

“We are classicists,” explained Archer Huntington, at a time when the art world was retreating from realism and headed off in the directions of Picasso’s cubism, Duchamp’s Dadaism, and the Bauhaus’s Surrealism. Classicist meant not only traditional statuary recalling the golden age of Rome and Athens, but also themes of classical mythology and classical literature, the gods and goddesses of antiquity, surrounded by a paradise of reflecting pools and flowing fountains.

The end result us a sprawling display that features a collection of bronze and marble sculptures that have inspired awestruck visitors for years, and will continue to do so for years to come.

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Explore the Brookgreen Gardens
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