The ruins of the Horry family home symbolize the Southern plantation system. Founded on this soil by the first colonists, the system flourished for generations but ultimately crumbled. When the Lords Proprietors established the colony, they copied the successful Barbadian plantation model. From Barbados to Carolina, large landowners profited from the labor of enslaved Africans who built homes, cleared fields, planted seeds, and harvested crops. The Horry-Lucas mansion burned in 1865 near the end of the Civil War, and its ashes marked the end of the slave-based plantation system that had originated with the settlers here nearly 200 years earlier.