Home Place Plantation – Fairfield County

Basic Information

• Location – Seven miles northeast of Winnsboro, Fairfield County (1)
  

• Origin of name – Dr. Hall owned several plantations and called Home Place Plantation such as it was his primary residence (1).
  

• Other names – ?

• Current status – ?

Timeline

• ? – Earliest known date of existence

• ? – Laban Hall acquired the property (1).
  

• 1844 – House built by Laban Hall (1).
  

• 1846 – Laban Hall sold the plantation to his brother Dr. William Ellison Hall (1).
  

• 1860 – Dr. Hall was the third largest land owner in Fairfield County owning approximately 12,000 acres. In addition to Home Place Plantation, Hall had also acquired Lewis Place Plantation and Pea Ridge Plantation (1).
  

• During the Civil War, Union troops pillaged the house. It is also believed General William T. Sherman stayed in the house at Home Place Plantation while waiting for the Catawba River to recede as the house was located on a high hill and one could see the town of Great Falls from it (1).
  

• 1864 – Dr. Hall passed away (1).
  

• 1867 – Hall family relative, Jesse Alexander Gladden, purchased the plantation (1).
  

• Circa 1950 – A tenant farmer named Nettings destroyed the house with fire (1).
  

Land

• Number of acres – 781 in 1867 (1)
  

• Primary crop – Cotton (1)

Slaves

• Number of slaves – 191 by Dr. Hall (1)

• Kristi Jones shares, "Dr. Hall was a very kind and fair man who actually freed one of his slaves and bought her a house. Records from former slaves (taken in the 1930s; slave narratives from SC) has a narrative from Adeline Hall Johnson, who indicated that Master William, as she called him, remembered the Lord always and read his Bible everyday after breakfast. She talks more about the family, the Yankees, and her duties as a house maid."
  

References & Resources

1. Information contributed by Kristi Cavett Jones and Russell S. Hall, both Hall family descendants.
   

2. William Kauffman Scarborough, Masters of the Big House: Elite Slaveholders of the Mid-Nineteenth-Century South (Baton Rouge, LA: LSU Press, 2006)