Mulberry Plantation

(Berkeley County). Built for the planter, Indian trader, and political leader Thomas Broughton, Mulberry is one of the most distinctive eighteenth-century houses in America. Set on a bluff overlooking the west branch of the Cooper River about three miles south of Moncks Corner, the house is stylistically unique and has variously been described as having Jacobean, French, and Anglo-Dutch baroque origins. Its design blends seventeenth-century forms with the formality of eighteenth-century Georgian architecture in a unified composition. The date of construction has generally been accepted as 1714, although evidence suggests that the house may have been finished by 1711. The two-story brick structure is laid in English bond with a molded brick water table. Its overall form has the squat profile typical of early Huguenot-influenced plantation houses in the lowcountry. The square main block has a steeply pitched gambrel roof with jerkin-head (clipped and inward-sloping) gables. Attached at the corners are four one-story brick pavilions with bell-shaped roofs. The floor plan is asymmetrical, with the stair hall set in the rear. The first-floor interior was remodeled with a new staircase and Adamesque cornices and mantles about 1800. The second-story rooms retain their original woodwork.

In 1916 Mulberry was restored under the oversight of the architect Charles Brenden, an Englishman who practiced in New York, and in the 1920s the landscape architect Loutrel Briggs redesigned the grounds. The house was designated a National Historic Landmark by the U.S. Department of the Interior in 1960. Mulberry remains in private ownership. Historic Charleston Foundation holds protective easements on the house and surrounding acreage. See plate 9.

Lane, Mills. Architecture of the Old South: South Carolina. Savannah, Ga.: Beehive, 1984.