The Point of Pines Slave Cabin
About 1853
A whole wooden cabin stands inside the gallery, a small building of rough pine boards with a single door, one window and a brick chimney at the end. It was one of a row of cabins on the Point of Pines plantation on Edisto Island, South Carolina, where enslaved people grew sea island cotton. Families of up to ten people lived in a single room like this, sleeping on the floor or on simple pallets, cooking at the hearth, and stepping out at dawn to the fields. You can walk in and stand where they stood.
The cabin was built around eighteen fifty three, and the construction is simple but careful: hewn timbers, a plank floor raised off the damp ground, and a chimney of handmade brick. Look at the wear on the door sill and the marks of tools on the boards. The people who lived here were skilled carpenters, masons and farmers, and they built almost everything on the plantation, including this house. After emancipation the cabin was not abandoned. Freed families and their descendants kept living in it until the nineteen eighties, so it also tells a story of survival and continuity.
The Edisto Island Historic Preservation Society gave the cabin to the museum, and in twenty thirteen a team took it apart board by board, numbered every piece, and rebuilt it inside the building before the walls of the gallery were finished. It is one of the largest objects in the collection and one of the few places in any museum where you can enter a home built by and for enslaved people.
Did You Know? The cabin was taken apart piece by piece on Edisto Island and reassembled inside the museum while the building was still under construction, because it would not fit through any finished door.
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