Charles Pinckney National Historic Site: Snee Farm on South Carolina's Coastal Plain

Charles Pinckney National Historic Site, in Mount Pleasant just outside Charleston, South Carolina, preserves 28 acres of Snee Farm, Charles Pinckney's 715-acre 18th-century plantation.

A boardwalk trail leads to a tidal marsh. Image from the National Park Service's page on the site's geodiversity

Snee Farm

• His father, Colonel Charles Pinckney, bought the farm in 1754, three years before the younger Pinckney was born.
• Pinckney grew up between this "country home" and the family's house in downtown Charleston.
• He inherited Snee Farm in 1782 and kept growing rice and indigo there with an enslaved workforce.
• Congress established the historic site in 1988.

Pinckney's house and the original outbuildings are gone, but the 1828 farmhouse and the surviving outbuildings tell the story of farming in South Carolina's Lowcountry from the mid-17th to the late 20th century.

A tree-lined drive. Image from the National Park Service's page on the site's geodiversity

The land beneath

The page is part of the NPS Geodiversity Atlas, a product of the Geologic Resources Inventory. Geodiversity is the full variety of a park's natural geologic resources — rocks, minerals, sediments, fossils, landforms and physical processes — and its soils. The atlas supports education, geoconservation, and managing a park's living and non-living resources together.

The site lies in the Coastal Plain Physiographic Province and shares its geologic history and characteristic formations with a region stretching far beyond the park.

• The NPS Geologic Resources Inventory, which makes digital geologic maps and reports for more than 270 natural resource parks, lists its products for the site in the NPS DataStore: scoping summaries (the meetings where NPS staff and local geologists planned the mapping), digital geologic maps for GIS, reports on a park's setting, features, management issues and history, and posters. Many are still in progress.
• An NPS Soil Resources Inventory of the site has been completed (DataStore).

More: the park's home page · geologic time · regional geology.

Sources

Based on "NPS Geodiversity Atlas—Charles Pinckney National Historic Site, South Carolina," National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain.