Hobcaw Barony: Rice, Ruin, and Bernard Baruch

Hobcaw Barony traces its origins to seventeen eighteen, when the Lords Proprietors granted twelve thousand acres on Waccamaw Neck, a long peninsula between the Atlantic and the Waccamaw River, to John, Lord Carteret. The land was later subdivided into several large rice plantations that became among the wealthiest in the colonial South. Enslaved laborers built and maintained the elaborate canal-and-trunk irrigation systems that made tidal rice cultivation possible, and the plantation economy here flourished for more than a century.

The Civil War ended that era. After emancipation, the plantations fell into decline. Starting in nineteen oh five, financier Bernard Baruch bought up the old plantations one by one, eventually consolidating some sixteen thousand acres into a private retreat. Baruch, who would serve as an advisor to multiple presidents, entertained Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt here. He used Hobcaw as a sanctuary for hunting and fishing and for confidential conversations away from Washington.

His daughter Belle Baruch acquired the land from him and, before her death in nineteen sixty-four, set up a foundation to preserve it for conservation and research. Today the Hobcaw Barony is held by the Belle W. Baruch Foundation and managed as a living laboratory for coastal ecology and history.