Fenwick Hall

Fenwick Hall was built around 1730 by the Fenwick family on land acquired by John Fenwick on the Stono River by 1721. Edward Fenwick inherited the property around 1750 and added to the estate, importing English thoroughbred horses and constructing a three-mile racing track on the grounds. The main house is one of the older surviving examples of Georgian plantation architecture in the South Carolina Lowcountry.

During the British occupation of Charleston in 1780, Sir Henry Clinton used Fenwick Hall as his base of operations, giving the estate the local nickname Head Quarters. Edward Fenwick Jr. publicly welcomed the British but provided intelligence to American General Nathanael Greene in 1782, operating as a double agent during the final phase of the Revolutionary War.

The house served as a hospital for both Confederate and Union forces during the Civil War. In 1980, new owners converted the property into Fenwick Hall Hospital, a private alcohol and drug rehabilitation facility serving wealthy clients at rates reaching $14,000 per month. The hospital closed in 1995, and the property sat largely empty until 2000, when new owners purchased it as a private residence and renamed it Fenwick Hall Plantation.

The estate's history is inseparable from the labor of enslaved people who built and worked the plantation through its colonial and antebellum decades. Their work made the Fenwick wealth and the surviving architecture possible. The property is privately owned and not open to the public.