Hanover House

The Upcountry & Lake Hartwell Country

The historic Hanover House was originally constructed in the low country, off the west branch of the Cooper River, in Berkeley County in 1716. Hanover House, built by French Huguenot, Paul De St Julien, was an eighteenth century rice plantation, now serving as an historic house museum, interpreting the lives of all who lived there from 1716-1938. In 1741, there were 45 enslaved African-Americans. Mary De St Julien inherited Hanover at her father Paul’s death, and, with her marriage to Henry Ravenel in September 1750, Hanover passed into the Ravenel family who owned it for 138 years. Threatened with demolition, Hanover was dismantled and reconstructed by Clemson College, now Clemson University, in 1941 before the home site was flooded as part of the Santee Cooper project creating Lake Moultrie. The interior was restored with the assistance of the Spartanburg Committee of the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America, representing the colonial settlement through the Revolutionary War. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, Hanover House is furnished as an historic house museum. The landscape, maintained by the South Carolina Botanical Garden as an educational garden, interprets the early Colonial explorers and naturalists of the era: Mark Catesby, Andre Michaux, William Bartram, and later descendent Henry William Ravenel.

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