10/09/2026
💕 A favorite for good reason. This is an interesting read too!
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Right next door to Murrells Inlet, SC , a woman who had already turned down one of the richest men in America bought four old rice plantations and turned them into the first public sculpture garden in the country.
Anna Hyatt Huntington didn’t need the money. By 1915 she was one of ten women in America earning more than $50,000 a year from her work, mostly animal bronzes and equestrian statues. Her Joan of Arc still stands on Riverside Drive in New York. She grew up in Cambridge, the daughter of a Harvard paleontologist, and almost became a concert violinist until her sister pushed her toward clay.
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Archer Huntington asked three times. He was the adopted son of railroad magnate Collis P. Huntington. She said no twice. She only said yes after he promised marriage would not end her career. They married on March 10, 1923 ...also both of their birthdays. She was 47. He was 53. Locals still call it their three-in-one day.
They were not shopping for a garden. Anna had tuberculosis, and they wanted a warm place to work through the winter. In the fall of 1929 an unsolicited brochure showed up at their Manhattan townhouse: “Four Colonial Plantations on the Waccamaw River.” On January 24, 1930, they paid $225,000 for about 6,600 acres. They kept buying until they held more than 9,000 acres of forest, old rice fields, swamp, and beach between the Waccamaw and the Atlantic. Brookgreen, The Oaks, Springfield, and Laurel Hill. Right beside Murrells Inlet
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That land was not empty history. Brookgreen Plantation had belonged to Joshua John Ward. Before he died in 1853 he held more than 1,000 enslaved people. In 1860 his estate was the largest slaveholder in the United States. The Alston cemetery is still on the grounds. Governor Joseph Alston and his child are buried there, and the same grave is a memorial to his wife, Theodosia Burr Alston, daughter of Aaron Burr, lost at sea.
The Huntingtons did not keep it as a private winter house. Eighteen months after the purchase they incorporated Brookgreen Gardens as a nonprofit for American sculpture set among native plants and animals. It opened to the public in 1932. Archer wrote the checks. Anna chose the early collection, including a striking number of women sculptors. Her own Fighting Stallions still stands at the gate. Across the highway they built Atalaya, the winter house with her studios, now inside Huntington Beach State Park.
A few things people don’t always hear. When they arrived, the closest town with electricity was Georgetown. Archer had power run out to Atalaya and paid for the people living along the lines. They also built schools on the Brookgreen property and on Sandy Island. Anna kept working until illness stopped her near the end. She died in 1973, at 97. Archer had died in 1955.
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