Reconstruction and Early Tourism
1866 - 1900

Following the Civil War, Rev. John Grimké Drayton, once one of the South’s wealthiest landowners, was reduced to near poverty. Only by sacrificing his sea island plantation, his town house, and much of this beloved Magnolia Plantation, was he able to rebuild. Owning a modest pre-revolutionary summer house in Summerville, 14 miles up the Ashley River, he disassembled the house, loaded it on barges, floated it to Magnolia, and mounted it on the burned-out ground floor walls.

However, Magnolia Plantation’s garden began to draw increasing national recognition. By 1870, while Charleston and the South was still recovering from the devastating effects of the Civil War, Magnolia Plantation had opened its gates to the general public to tour it’s beautiful gardens and grounds. Steamboats would bring tourists up the Ashley River from Charleston by the hundreds, breathing new life into the already two century old plantation. The European Edition of Baedecker’s travel guide listed it, along with the Grand Canyon and Niagara Falls, as one of the three foremost attractions in America. Horticulturists and tourists increasingly made it a springtime mecca. By the late 1870s views of Magnolia’s famous gardens could be viewed in stereoview photographs for sale around the country.

A unique by-product of this budding tourist destination was the role former slaves would play. While most former slaves in the Lowcountry were either forced to work as share-croppers on the former plantations were they were enslaved or migrate away from the area, Magnolia Plantation, or “Magnolia on the Ashley,” as it was now being called, offered a variety of jobs.  Many of the plantations former slaves stayed on to work as gardeners, porters, and servants in the burgeoning tourism industry at Magnolia.

Many of these former slaves and newly hired blacks would live on the property in the former slave quarters, a practice that would continue well into the 20th century as late as 1999. Some of these structures still stand on the property today, standing silent vigil and tribute to the endurance of generations of African-Americans who lived, worked, and toiled at Magnolia Plantation and following emancipation, maintained the gardens and grounds to help build the early tourism industry in Charleston.

In 1889 at age 74, Reverend John Grimké Drayton found himself, as had his grandfather before him, with no son to carry on the Drayton name as heir to Magnolia. Unlike his grandfather, who had insisted that his grandchild assume the name of Drayton as a condition of inheritance, he willed the plantation to his daughter, Julia Drayton Hastie and her children. In the following year, ownership of Magnolia Plantation passed on from the man who had devoted a lifetime to leaving more beauty in the world than he had found.

By the end of the 19th century, Magnolia Plantation had become Charleston’s most famous attraction.