Despite Everything, People Still Have Weddings at ‘Plantation’ Sites.

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Belle Montgomery

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Weddings help pay for education at American labor camp sites and connect us with history. Is that good enough?

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The Whitney Plantation in Wallace, La., does not support weddings. Credit...Elsa Hahne
By Michael T. Luongo
  • Published Oct. 17, 2020
  • Updated Oct. 20, 2020
Edited.

Monuments have been removed, by vote and by force.

But those symbols include the romanticized imagery of weddings on Southern “plantations,” a practice that carries on. These properties were forced work camps, where enslaved Africans and their descendants were tortured and killed.

Perhaps nowhere has benefited more from the idea of the romance of Southern weddings than Charleston, S.C., where the Civil War began, and which is now one of the top destination wedding locales in the United States, hosting nearly 6000 weddings in 2019 before the coronavirus pandemic interrupted the industry.

Winslow Hastie’s family has owned Magnolia Plantation & Gardens since the late 1670s. Mr. Hastie, who is white, is also the president and chief executive officer of Historic Charleston Foundation, which works to preserve structures, many built by enslaved people.

Magnolia “opened to the public in 1872,” Mr. Hastie said. “I think it was actually one of the first tourist attractions in the state of South Carolina. And that was out of economic necessity.”

Today, Mr. Hastie said, ...

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