Hampton-Preston Mansion

Hampton-Preston Mansion

 

In 1970, when our state was celebrating its tricentennial, major expositions were planned for three sites covering three distinct periods in South Carolina history: Charleston for the colonial period, Columbia for the time between the Revolution and the Civil War, and Greenville to represent the state since Reconstruction.

The Columbia part of the tricentennial focused on an area designated as the Midlands Exposition Park, encompassing a one-block stretch along Blanding Street including two historic structures and twin geodesic domes containing various displays. The two extant buildings included the Robert Mills House, which was acquired by Historic Columbia in 1967, and the Hampton-Preston Mansion just across the street, which had just become the responsibility of Historic Columbia in the tricentennial year.

Built in 1818, the Hampton-Preston Mansion had served as the city residence of two of the most economically and politically significant families of the antebellum period. Three generations of the Hampton family had loomed large in state affairs — from Wade Hampton I, who fought in the Revolution before serving in the U.S. Congress and amassing a fortune in agricultural holdings in several states, to Wade Hampton III, who fought in the Civil War and whose election as governor in 1876 effectively ended Reconstruction in our state. Wade Hampton I’s daughter Caroline married Virginia native John S. Preston, who relocated to Columbia where he added to his wealth — most of his fortune came from a sugar plantation in Louisiana — and also became a major player in South Carolina politics.

As one might imagine when the mansion first opened to the public as a house museum in 1970, visitors would have encountered narrative materials focused primarily on the lifestyle of the planter elite who enjoyed the building’s elaborate interior spaces and four-acre gardens. Little attention was paid to the generations of enslaved workers who not only built the house but kept everything running smoothly for its privileged owners.

Today, after extensive upgrades to the property, including new exterior paint colors in keeping with the building’s antebellum past and a reconfiguration of the gardens with period-appropriate plants, the story of the mansion itself has also undergone an update. Now the guided tour and exhibits provide an interpretation of the site’s meaning that incorporates information about not only the antebellum owners but also the enslaved people who worked for both planter families.

This two-pronged approach begins with the gardens, where visitors encounter signage that approximates the location of two buildings that once stood diagonally behind the main house, one serving as the main kitchen and the other as an office and laundry. The 1863 will of Mary Cantey Hampton, Wade I’s third wife, listed among her possessions two families made up of 33 men, women and children who lived on the second floors of those buildings and maintained the house and grounds.

Little is known about the lives — let alone the hopes and dreams — of the enslaved people who toiled for the Hampton and Preston families. The basic facts of any slave’s existence are most often encapsulated in documents related to the buying, selling or posthumous distribution of property. In the case of Mary Cantey Hampton’s will, for example, the 427 pieces of silverware received as much prominence as the list of human chattel to be distributed equitably among her daughter, son-in-law and grandchildren.

The little that Historic Columbia has been able to discover about the black residents on the property is presented to visitors in two formats. The script used by the guides is augmented by digital material shared via handheld tablet. Inserted below the window sills in the furnished rooms on the first floor and attached to the walls of the exhibits on the second floor are horizontal interpretive panels, all with informative text and images and some with small Plexiglas boxes containing relevant artifacts. Whether the average visitor can do justice to the full experience — listening to the guide’s recitation and reading the panels in each room — depends on the pacing of the tour.

Yet there is a wealth of material summarized on the panels, such as how much more the Hamptons may have valued their thoroughbreds over their enslaved workers — portraits of their prized race horses included no depictions of jockeys or grooms. I was particularly drawn to one panel which included two images of male servants taken by Columbia daguerreotypist J. T. Zealy in 1850 at the behest of Harvard professor Louis Agassiz, who argued erroneously that white and black people were different species.  Despite their use as specimens in support of a bogus theory, the beleaguered humanity of Fassena and Alfred speaks to the viewer across time.

Lest anyone think that with the freedom from bondage after war’s end and the promises made during Reconstruction, racial equality became the order of the day, Historic Columbia has set up two telling tableaux on the second floor, both reflective of the days of Jim Crow. The first is a space roughly equivalent to the size of a dorm room — from 1890 to 1930, the mansion was part of the architectural fabric of a women’s college. A quote from the 1924 college yearbook extols the virtues of four college servants, who represented, to the editors of that volume, the “bright aspects of the darker side of life.” Also on the second floor is a second tableau, this one representing a guest room in what was to become from 1946 to 1966 the Hampton-Preston Tourist Home, a whites-only establishment catering to travelers wishing to experience the site’s “nineteenth-century glory.”

Historic Columbia is to be commended for making considerable progress in balancing the narrative of South Carolina’s biracial history and, in so doing, trying to tell the whole story of our Southern past, warts and all.   

Tours of the Hampton-Preston Mansion are available Tuesday through Saturday at 11:30 a.m. and 2:30 p.m. and on Sunday at 2:30 p.m. Head to historiccolumbia.org for more info.

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