My occasional trips to South Carolina’s Lowcountry are always invigorating. Around central Indiana, the earliest cemeteries and schools were established just after the Civil War. Edisto Island offers a stark contrast. Take Bleak Hall Plantation, for example: it dates all the way back to 1749! Of course, that longevity came at a terrible human cost. Like other plantations in the region, Bleak Hall was built, maintained, and made profitable through the forced labor of enslaved people. Their labor powered the wealth and permanence that make places like this stand out so dramatically today.