South Carolina Department of Archives and History |
National Register Properties in South Carolina Middleburg Plantation, Berkeley County (on the Cooper River, Huger vicinity) |
Facade | Rear Elevation | Oak Avenue | Oak Avenue | Outbuilding Commissary |
Outbuilding Kitchen |
Rice Mill Chimney | Rice Fields | Outbuilding |
Middleburg, erected about 1699, is a splendid example of a transitional two-story frame plantation house. The structure retains the medieval plan of a one-room thickness, and also the exposed post and girt construction of the seventeenth century, even though it is two stories in height. Possibly the oldest extant wooden house in South Carolina, Middleburg’s plan of a single file of rooms, also forecasts the basic plan of Charleston’s Georgian “single house” of the eighteenth century, and is similar to the common nineteenth century vernacular I-House type found across South Carolina. The plantation house has undergone remarkably little alteration since the end of the eighteenth century. The house was built by Benjamin Simons, a French Huguenot planter whose descendants have owned it ever since. The exterior is a picture of simplicity, with clapboarded walls, hipped roof, and two chimneys. The porches and exterior rooms are considered eighteenth century additions. The porch posts supporting the structure are square to the height of the rail, and round above that. The entrance doors, two in each of the principal fronts, are battened and have original hardware. Two outbuildings, a commissary and a frame carriage house, are included in the acreage. Listed in the National Register April 15, 1970; Designated a National Historic Landmark April 15, 1970.
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