As it turned out, Charlotte had chosen where we would go on my birthday trip so we could tour the Hope Plantation. She said she started looking for historical sites in the Carolinas, & when she found one named Hope she knew that was where we had to go :-). We got there just as it was opening Saturday morning, & for the most part had a private tour of the entire site, which was so, so interesting. Our first stop was the King-Bazemore House, which had actually been moved to the property. It was donated to the Historic Hope Foundation with the understanding that it would have to be moved to the plantation property. It was actually about forty years older than the Plantation House, and much smaller, although our tour guide said it was a very nice house for 1763, when it was built. This is the Hall, which included all the original woodwork on the walls. That just blew me away. It was beautiful.
Our tour moved up to the big Hope Plantation House, and it was equally interesting and just so, so well preserved. There were five things in the house that were original to it, I think our tour guide said, but all of the other furnishings were from the period, and were things that would’ve been used to furnish houses in that part of the country. This was in the children’s bedroom.
After we finished up at the plantation, we headed to Belhaven to visit the Belhaven Museum, where the info online said they had a display of 30,000 buttons. How could pass up something with that kind of hype? And it did, in fact, have 30,000 buttons, but it was so much more. It had all kinds of stuff that just looked like they drug it out of someone’s attic, and then had like a whale skull and a part of a space ship found in the waters off the Bahamas. It was crazy and entertaining – so, so funny. In among all these rows and shelves of just a conglomeration that can’t be described, I happened to see this Pluto Water Bottle, which is from the springs where we vacationed with Addie & Lee & the kids when we were in French Lick, Indiana, this past summer. It was crazy. Just such a good, good day.