most historians focus their or inion on virginia terms of the seaport in charleston. wilmington played an incredibly important role during the war. not many people know about fort anderson. they hear about the forts guarding wilmington during the civil war, to hear about fort fisher and understandably so. the site of the two largest naval bombardments of the war, the largest amphibian operation in american history up until world war ii. we have this great earthen fort that is very important in guarding the city. we are here at the historic site of the national trust for historic preservation. the draytons were an important south carolina family. they play critical roles in the formation and development of the colony of south carolina. and in the formation of the nation itself. in fact, if you follow their trajectory through the 19th century, you will see the different descendents came apart as well. the family allows us to follow both the birth and development of the carolina
they were 40 to 100 slaves in this area of drayton hall. but to run this house itself, the drayton s head cooks, butler s, stable hands, blacksmiths. they had carpenters. we have gone through the slave lists and identify the names of these individuals. we have tried to highlight those places that are distinctively african american, like the african-american cemetery that dates to the 1790 s. we have done careful research to show the area to have been a cemetery. making it the oldest documented african-american cemetery in the nation still in use. descendents of the african-american can any from drayton hall can be interred there. the last person to be interred there was richmond bowens, born in 1980. he died in 1998. he was a remarkable source of oral history for us and that a lot of work in educating people on the cane to drayton hall about this site as he remembered it growing up. parents and the african-american community here used the natural resources around for medicina