A famous nineteenth-century rice plantation owned by Pierce Butler of Philadelphia, Butler Island Plantation used a system of dikes and canals for the cultivation of rice installed by engineers from Holland. That system is still in evidence in the old fields and has been used as a pattern for similar operations in recent years. During a visit here with her husband in 1839-40, Pierce Butler's wife, the brilliant English actress Fannie Kemble, wrote her "Journal of a Residence On A Georgia Plantation," which is said to have influenced England against the Confederacy.