This house, with its copper roof and unusual for its time Gothic architecture style, brings a new meaning to vintage. It's older than vintage. Original. I can't actually even begin to build a frame of reference to understand what this house has been through and what those walls have been a part of. Working plantation, rebuilding, squatters in the dirty 30s, a real estate office, a family dwelling. It's seen it all.
And on top of all that, it survived a serious fire in the 1980s. The house wasn't burned in the Civil War, one of only a few plantations in the area, but it burned in the 80s. I find this to be an interesting conundrum. It burned when it housed the real estate office that was in charge of parceling off the land into lots for new mansions to be built in a development now known as "Rose Hill." Fitting considering the original plantation, which was more than 2,000 continuous acres, was named Rose Hill Plantation. The house Rose Hill Mansion.
The Kirk family owned Rose Hill and the plantation was one of the largest Island Cotton producers of their time. Island Cotton was worth sixty dollars a bale compared to the some odd cents a "normal" bale of cotton's market value. Needless to say, that's a serious amount of wealth. Island Cotton is now extinct so "don't let anyone tell you something you purchase is made from Island Cotton because it isn't."
Now, you might be wondering how I can be so sure on all of the above information. No, I didn't take that quote from Wikipedia. That little piece of cotton advice comes straight from a Kirk family member. I heard all of that history first hand from the great-great-great-great granddaughter of one of the founding Kirks. She doesn't live in the original house but she does give tours and offers her take on her family's history all the way from the Kirk family literally leaving their dinner dishes on the dining room table to flee from the Union troops coming up their winding drive to the secession flag of South Carolina being designed in an upstairs bedroom to the dozens of homeless who tried to stay warm by curling up with their blankets and families in the abandoned house during the Depression years to the people who returned the house to itself.
I suppose just like anything else, the Rose Hill mansion has had its ups and downs. I don't agree with all that happened on that land when it was still a working plantation, but I must say walking out the front door to see the drooping trees and light sparkling through them was an experience. And I was once again reminded of how far our country has come to unite itself after it came dangerously close to splitting in two. I realize it's not a perfect union, but I can only hope we all keep striving to make this place and our own everyday lives a true model of acceptance and that the human - all human - race will someday cease seeing what makes us all different and instead, see what matters. To remember we all have one soul, one brain, one heart, and bleed red.
Just think of those walls of that house and the branches of those trees talking and what they tell us. It is almost impossible to step around that kind of original old and not hear all of the people who once walked through the same hallways, once felt the shade under those same trees, once smelled that same pollen floating through the air...
A whisper here and a breeze in your hair there.
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