Hampton Plantation

Hampton Plantation sat inside one of the largest slaveholdings in the South. Wade Hampton III managed cotton land for his father in South Carolina and Mississippi, and when his father died in 1858 he inherited a vast fortune, plantations and enslaved people. After serving as a Confederate lieutenant general he became a leading voice of the Lost Cause, insisting that slavery had been benign, a claim his own holdings of thousands of enslaved people refute. He also resented the use of Black soldiers in occupying forces in South Carolina.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lakeport Plantation — 18 mi
  Arkansas's grandest surviving Greek Revival plantation house, built about 1858 by a planter who held 155 enslaved people in 1860, now an Arkansas State University museum.
• Grant's Canal, Lake Providence — 18 mi
  About 1,000 feet of the ditch Union troops dug in early 1863 to get Grant's army around Vicksburg, with a boardwalk, a pier and a visitor center in the Byerley House.
• Louisiana State Cotton Museum — 19 mi
  A state museum on US 65 north of Lake Providence with a sharecropper's cabin, a commissary and a gin house, in the parish where John H. Scott worked for Black voting rights.
• Delta National Forest — 22 mi
  The only bottomland hardwood forest in the national forest system, some 60,000 acres of oak, ash and cypress in Sharkey County, run with the state as Sunflower Wildlife Management Area.

More markers nearby

• Sharkey County Courthouse — 11 mi
• Sam Chatmon — 13 mi
• Galloway Place Mound — 16 mi
• Lakeport in the Civil War — 18 mi