Cane Acre Plantation – Charleston County

Basic Information

• Location – St. Paul Parish, Charleston County

• Origin of name – ?

• Other names – ?

• Current status – ?

Timeline

• ? – Earliest known date of existence

• 1750s – Thomas Cheverall (Sacheverell) owned Cane Acre. He kept 22 slaves on the property, but did not live there himself. He probably lived at his main plantation, Oak Lawn.
  

  Thomas Cheverall was active in his community. He represented St Paul Parish in the royal assembly from 1749-1751, was a member of the militia for Willtown District, served as a trustee of the Willtown Presbyterian Church, and was a founding member of the Charleston Library Society (3, p. 409).
  

• ? – House built

• ? – Henry Grimke owned the plantation.
  

  Henry Grimke had a relationship with Nancy Weston, a mulatto house slave. They had three children together: Francis, Archibald, and John Grimke (2).
  

• 1852 – Henry Grimke died in the typhoid epidemic of 1852. Nancy Weston was pregnant at the time with their third child. A codicil to his will stipulated that Nancy and his sons become the property of Grimke's adult son, Montague, an engineer for the Northeastern Railroad. Henry Grimke could not free his family because an 1820 state statute prohibited emancipations within the state (2).
  

  After Henry Grimke's death the plantation was sold to Bayard B. Davidson (1).
  

Land

• Number of acres – ?

• Primary crop – Rice

Owners

• Chronological list – Cheverall (Sacheverell) (1750s); Henry Grimke (?-1852); Bayard B. Davidson
  

Slaves

• Number of slaves – 22 (Cheverall)

  Henry Grimke had three children by Nancy Weston, a mulatto house slave. Grimke planned to move Nancy and his sons to Charleston after the birth of Nancy's third child, but he died unexpectedly during the typhoid epidemic of 1852. A codicil to Grimke's will stipulated that Nancy and his sons become the property of his son, Montague, an engineer for the Northeastern Railroad. Grimke could not free his family himself because an 1820 state statute prohibited emancipations within the state. Montague allowed Nancy and her sons to live in Charleston relatively free. Later, he made Archibald and Francis slaves in his own household (2).
  

Buildings

• ?

References & Resources

1. Colleton County Deeds - scroll down to view the following deeds: Daniel Willis to W. F. Cone, 01 Aug 1870 - source no longer available online
   

2. Wilma King, Within the Professional Household: Slave Children in the Antebellum South - contains information on the children of Henry Grimke and Nancy Weston
   

3. Suzanne Cameron Linder, Historical Atlas of the Rice Plantations of the ACE River Basin - 1860 (Columbia, SC: South Carolina Department of Archives and History, 1995)
    Order Historical Atlas of the Rice Plantations of the ACE River Basin - 1860