Kensington Plantation House, Antebellum plantation house in Eastover, United States.
Kensington Plantation House is an antebellum residence in Richland County featuring a central copper dome and lower wings connected by arched colonnades on each side. The structure displays Second Empire architectural details with symmetrical design elements throughout its exterior and interior layout.
Matthew Richard Singleton renamed the plantation Kensington after returning from Europe and inheriting it from his father, Colonel Richard Singleton. The mansion was built between 1851 and 1854 to designs by Charleston architects Edward Culliatt Jones and Francis D. Lee, inspired by the Louvre and Palace of Fontainebleau. Enslaved skilled laborers planed cypress and pine, shaped bricks, mixed plaster, and forged ironwork. The house stayed in the Singleton family until 1910, was listed on the National Register in 1971, and Union Camp restored it in the early 1980s.
The name Kensington replaced Headquarters after Matthew Richard Singleton and his wife Martha Rutledge Kinloch took over the site in the 1840s. Jacob Stroyer, enslaved here as a child, later described in his autobiography My Life in the South his training as a groom and the 15 horses, 80 cattle and 217 pigs he tended.
The residence sits east of Eastover and is accessible via South Carolina Highway 764, making it relatively easy to reach by car. Visitors should note the rural location requires some planning, as amenities and facilities may be limited in the surrounding area.
The three-part porte-cochere carries modified Corinthian arches and pilasters carved with goat heads, a detail drawn from the Louvre and Palace of Fontainebleau designs by Charleston architects Edward Culliatt Jones and Francis D. Lee. The mansion's cypress and pine lumber, bricks, plaster and ironwork were all produced by enslaved laborers on the plantation between 1851 and 1854.
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