Boone Hall

Where it sits. Boone Hall lies on Long Point Road in Mount Pleasant, on the northern side of Charleston Harbor about eight miles from downtown Charleston and a short drive from the Ravenel Bridge. The property runs to several hundred acres of sandy Lowcountry flatland between US 17 and Horlbeck Creek, a tidal arm that once carried barges of the plantation's produce and brick to the city. What most visitors picture is the approach: a straight avenue almost three-quarters of a mile long, lined by two ranks of live oaks whose limbs meet overhead in a continuous vault of moss and leaf.

The story behind it. The land was granted in 1681 to Major John Boone, an early English settler and Indian trader, and it has been farmed continuously ever since, which allows the estate to describe itself as one of the oldest working plantations in the United States. Captain Thomas Boone began planting the Avenue of Oaks in 1743; the trees took roughly two centuries to close the canopy, which finally happened in the 1940s. The Horlbeck family, who owned the property through the nineteenth century, made money from three things: cotton, brick and pecans. Boone Hall's own clay pits and kilns produced brick for Charleston buildings, and in the early twentieth century the estate ran what was for a time the largest pecan grove in the country. The house that visitors tour is not the eighteenth-century original, which had decayed beyond saving; it is a Colonial Revival mansion built in 1936 by the Canadian diplomat Thomas Stone, using the estate's own brick and deliberately styled to look older than it is. The plantation is still commercially farmed today, with strawberries, tomatoes, peaches and pumpkins in the fields and pick-your-own days through the season.

Slave Street. The most historically important thing on the property is not the house. Nine small brick cabins stand in a line along the approach, built between roughly 1790 and 1810 from brick made on site. Brick quarters were unusual — most enslaved housing across the Lowcountry was timber — and the row's position, in full view of the drive rather than hidden behind the house, suggests it was partly a display of the owner's wealth. The cabins now hold an exhibition tracing slavery, emancipation and the Gullah culture of the sea islands, and the plantation runs a live presentation of Gullah language, song and craft in an open-air theatre nearby. Boone Hall's willingness to place this material at the centre of a paid visit, rather than at its margins, has drawn both praise and continuing criticism about how plantation sites narrate their history.

On screen. The avenue and the cabins have made Boone Hall one of the most filmed properties in South Carolina. Its best-documented credits are two major television productions of the 1980s and 1990s.

• North and South (ABC, 1985) used the estate as Mont Royal, the South Carolina plantation of the Main family, across the miniseries and its sequels
• Alex Haley's Queen (CBS, 1993) filmed extensively on the grounds and along Slave Street
• The Notebook (2004) shot on the property during its Charleston-area production, using the Lowcountry to stand in for its 1940s Seabrook Island setting

Because the main house dates only to 1936, productions needing genuine antebellum interiors work elsewhere and use Boone Hall for its avenue, its fields and its brick row.

What you actually see today. A visit takes in a guided tour of the main floor of the 1936 house, the Slave Street exhibition, the Gullah presentation, the butterfly pavilion and formal gardens laid out in front of the house, the smokehouse, and a tractor-drawn coach tour of the working fields and the creek. The gardens hold heirloom roses and a long azalea season that peaks in April. The oak avenue is the single most photographed thing on the property; it is at its best in early morning light before the tour coaches arrive.

Getting there and timing. The entrance is signposted from US 17 in Mount Pleasant, roughly twenty minutes by car from downtown Charleston, and there is a large free car park. There is no public transport to the gate. Tickets are timed, the last admission is well before closing, and the site shuts on major public holidays. Spring is the strongest season, combining azaleas, strawberry picking and mild weather, while October brings a large pumpkin patch and an autumn festival. Gravel paths, grass and the sandy Slave Street surface make wheelchair use possible with assistance, and the house tour involves steps.