Enslaved Africans and their Gullah Geechee descendants lived and worked on Snee Farm plantation from the 1700s to 1865. Before the Civil War, agricultural use shifted from rice and corn and other staples. Cotton appeared in the final decades of the 1800s. Farming ceased by the early 1930s, and from 1936 to the end of private ownership in 1988, the former plantation was used as a private residence. In the nearly 300 years of human habitation, buildings came and went as economic and social changes affected the economy and thus the landscape. Through archeological excavations and research, evidence of a detached kitchen, smokehouse, enslaved quarters, and other structures typical of a plantation has been found on the property. Only four structures stood on the remnant 28 acres of what was once a 715-acre plantation in 1988, when the National Park Service acquired the site from the Friends of Snee Farm.