Brookgreen Gardens, Sculpture on a Rice Plantation

South of Myrtle Beach near Murrells Inlet lies one of the most unexpected places on the whole coast, Brookgreen Gardens, the first public sculpture garden in America. It was created in nineteen thirty one and opened the next year by Archer Huntington, a wealthy scholar and stepson of a railroad magnate, and his wife Anna Hyatt Huntington, herself one of the finest American sculptors of her era. She had been diagnosed with tuberculosis, and they came south hoping the climate would restore her.

Instead they built something lasting. Today the grounds hold roughly fourteen hundred works of American figurative sculpture set among live oaks and reflecting pools, the largest such outdoor collection in the world. But walk the paths and you are walking the ground of four former rice plantations, Brookgreen, The Oaks, Springfield, and Laurel Hill.

The Huntingtons named the whole place for one of them. That immense rice wealth was built entirely on the labor of thousands of enslaved West Africans, people who brought generations of rice growing knowledge to this coast and whose descendants became the Gullah Geechee. Brookgreen today tells both stories, the art and the plantation ground beneath it.