Boone Hall

This was my first slave plantation, and I was left distinctly unimpressed.

The approach to the plantation is exactly what you think of when you think of a slave plantation. A long, dusty road between gnarled oaks garlanded with Spanish moss. On the left, a long row of shabby brick slave houses. Ahead, a majestic colonnaded house overlooking the property. It looks the part.

The messaging at the plantation, however, does its best to sequester its slave-owning history amid the slave cabins. The tour of the cabins is self-guided and paints the picture mostly in broad strokes, addressing slavery generally, rather than specifically at the plantation. One cabin's exhibit addresses the slave-run brickworks at Boone Hall, but beyond that it's a lot of hand-wringing and blame-shifting. At intervals throughout the day there's a show on Gullah culture at one of the cabins, which feels like a nice bit of representation, though they were done with the shows for the day by the time we showed up at around 2 pm.

Boone Hall itself, the main plantation house, isn't the original. It was built in the early 20th century by a Canadian trying to rebuild what he thought a plantation house was meant to look like. It's weirdly asymmetrical and quixotically furnished on the inside with a mishmash of 18th-century European furniture. Spoiled by the National Trust on this front as well. The tour guide was chipper but a little overenthusiastic about the graces and talents of the current owner of the plantation, who is at once a talented pianist and painter and an eminently generous woman, letting us view the two grand pianos she keeps in the salon, one of which she plays at Christmastime for the entertainment of tourists. Oh and did you know she had nothing to do with the slaves, she'd never dream of owning slaves, couldn't dream of it in fact, isn't it ghastly.

2/5 you can do a heck of a lot better than that

A surprising disappointment, considering that it's a WWII-era aircraft carrier. I think I was expecting a better sense of how life was lived on the ship, but the displays are sparse and mostly static. I've become a bit too accustomed to English Heritage sites, with their plentiful placards and plaques, or National Trust houses with staff in key points to tell you about the wainscoting or the ceiling rose or the artwork; on the Yorktown we were greeted with simple signs indicating the purpose of a room, a couple of awkwardly positioned and woefully out-of-date mannequins, and little else. The WWII-era warplanes on the hangar deck still had their old radial engines, but the jets on the flight deck had all been stripped, leaving big holes where you could see through from the intakes to the outlets. It seems like tourists visiting an aircraft carrier would notice that kinda thing.

The ship feels as though it's lost its dynamism, stuck frozen in 1975 when it was decommissioned. That didn't stop Patriots Point, the operators of the Yorktown and a handful of other nearby wartime-history-related attractions, from erecting some pretty gratuitous displays of military patriotism, even by American standards.

We also visited a shabby replica of a Vietnam War-era forward base. This constituted a loose group of wooden shacks interspersed with period-correct vehicles—Jeeps and helicopters and trucks, all of which had seen more than their fair share of manhandling by sweaty tourists: brass knobs polished to a mirror finish, paint worn off handrails, tattered chicken wire on plank decking. The pumped-in sounds of war—far-off screaming, helicopters overhead, gunfire and explosions—were pretty cool, though I say this as someone who has never been to war.