Hofwyl-Broadfield Plantation, originally the Broadface Tract, was purchased in 1806 by William Brailsford, who renamed it Broadfield and grew rice in the marshlands along the Altamaha River. Brailsford and his wife, Maria Hayward, came from Charleston, South Carolina, a center of the southern rice industry, and Maria’s brother Nathaniel Hayward was the largest rice planter of the day, owning 15 plantations and more than 2,500 slaves. The land here was especially well suited for rice cultivation, and government records said the superior Broadfield Rice sold on the Charleston market took its name from the Brailsford plantation. The plantation remained in the same family through five generations of the Brailsford, Troup, and Dent families until the death of the last surviving heir, Ophelia Dent, in 1973. In the 1850s George C. Dent added the name Hofwyl after the Swiss agricultural school he attended. Ophelia Dent left the property to the State of Georgia as a memorial to her family and the workers who lived and died here. William Brailsford built the original plantation house on this site in 1807, and the present house was begun around 1851 and completed before the Civil War. Furnished with family antiques and heirlooms dating to the 1790s, the unpretentious two-story farmhouse and its original furnishings, along with the surviving outbuildings, preserve the last surviving rice plantation along the Georgia coast.