Butler Island Plantation in Georgia’s Altamaha River delta began as a rice plantation owned by Major Pierce Butler from 1790 and remained in his family after his death. It became closely associated with slavery through Frances Anne Kemble’s 1838–1839 diary, which recorded the brutal conditions endured by enslaved people, and through the 1859 sale of 436 enslaved people in the notorious Weeping Time. Abandoned at the start of the Civil War, the plantation could not be successfully restored afterward. Later converted to farming under Tillinghast L'Hommedieu Huston, the site is now significant chiefly for the history of rice wealth, enslavement, and the human cost preserved in its records.