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"H" is for Hopsewee Plantation

South Carolina From A to Z
SC Public Radio

“H” is for Hopsewee Plantation (Georgetown County). Hopsewee Plantation is best known as the birthplace and boyhood home of Thomas Lynch, Jr., a signer of the Declaration of Independence. It is located south of Georgetown at the point where U.S. Highway 17 crosses the north branch of the Santee River. This was also the site of the main colonial thoroughfare running north and south, the “King’s Highway.” In the 1740s, Thomas Lynch, Sr., built the house that still stands at Hopsewee. It is a two-and-one-half-story black cypress structure of mortise and tenon construction—set on a brick and tabby foundation. Its double-tiered piazza displays the influence of West Indian architecture in the eighteenth-century lowcountry. Hopsewee was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1971 and was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1972.

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Dr. Walter Edgar has two programs on South Carolina Public Radio: Walter Edgar's Journal, and South Carolina from A to Z. Dr. Edgar received his B.A. degree from Davidson College in 1965 and his Ph.D. from the University of South Carolina in 1969. After two years in the army (including a tour of duty in Vietnam), he returned to USC as a post-doctoral fellow of the National Archives, assigned to the Papers of Henry Laurens.