City Directories and History: The Cooper River Historic District, which is a 30,020-acre section of the region centered along both branches of the Cooper River, is a remarkably intact historic and cultural landscape. In the mid-eighteenth century, the Cooper River served not only as a principal transportation route for plantation goods, services and people, but also played a vital role in the successful production of rice. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries most of the plantations in the district were acquired by wealthy Northerners looking for a warmer climate in which they could create hunting preserves for their own pleasure and leisure-time activities. These new owners left their mark on the landscape by building stately new residences but they also played an important role in preserving the earlier landscape. Many historic buildings, structures, and objects from the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries are still standing, and archaeological remains of settlements, machines, barns, and other structures that supported agricultural activity are generally intact. In addition, landscape features such as rice fields, banks, canals, dams, reservoirs or reserves, causeways, roads, avenues, upland fields, fence lines, and cemeteries – many of them present on eighteenth and early nineteenth century plats and maps – can be seen on the ground today. Numerous outbuildings are also included with several of the properties. Listed in the National Register February 5, 2003. [Courtesy of the SC Dept. of Archives and History]
Click here for additional information on this property as shown in the National Register Nomination.
Horts or Halidon Hill Plantation comes next. This also was once a Ball place, but more recently was bought by Thomas Huguenin and the old Quinby house was rolled here and renovated. The name Horts was given the portion of land left Catherine, the daughter of Benjamin Simons III, in 1789. She was married to William Hort.
(Information from: Names in South Carolina by C.H. Neuffer, Published by the S.C. Dept. of English, USC)
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