Brookgreen: Behind the Garden Gates

Photography courtesy of Brookgreen Gardens.

The Huntingtons turned Brookgreen into a renowned collection of art on the Hammock Coast

I spent years going to the beaches along The Hammock Coast, like Litchfield Beach and Pawleys Island, without visiting Brookgreen Gardens. I would take note of the massive aluminum stallions on Highway 17 while running up to Lee’s Farmers Market or the fish camps of Murrells Inlet, but I never turned to discover what lies behind the garden gates.

It took a day of too much sun and maybe too much seafood, for that matter, to get me there. Now it’s a place I seek out. Its collected works are considered preeminent in the cadre of American sculpture, but the story of its property, reinvented thrice over, is something that continues to draw me in.

From Rice Plantations to Hunt Club

Brookgreen Gardens includes the land and man-made waterways of four rice plantations: Laurel Hill, The Oaks, Springfield, and Brookgreen. The rice planters along the Waccamaw River were some of America’s wealthiest citizens, and they enslaved a massive number of people to cultivate their wealth. In 1853, Joshua John Ward was the single-largest owner of enslaved people, with 1,092 forced laborers producing nearly four million pounds of long-grain rice he called Carolina Gold at the plantations, including Brookgreen.

After the Civil War, the four farms sat fallow for decades. Their canals, built to flood fields and transport products by boat, became tenanted with native grasses and seedling trees, naturalizing into shady the Lowcountry landscape. In 1920, local investors cobbled the properties together to create a hunting reserve named The Brookgreen Gun Club.

A Garden for Art

Just nine years later, Archer Huntington discovered Brookgreen while traveling south to find a place for his wife, artist Anna Hyatt Huntington, to recover from tuberculosis. They purchased 6,600 acres of the hunting reserve and grew their holdings to 9,127 acres of forest and riverfront property. They built a 30-room oceanfront home called Atalaya. It was a Moorish mansion of brick, dripping mortar, and tabby. Today, it is part of Huntington State Park.

The footprint of Brookgreen Plantation was identified for an immense botanical garden, and within 18 months, it was registered with the state of South Carolina as “a society for southeastern flora and fauna.” Anna quickly began integrating sculpture into the formalized gardens and opened the grounds to visitors. Brookgreen became the first public sculpture garden in America and included works from the likes of Paul Manship and Frederick Remington.

The timing of the Huntingtons’ arrival was fortuitous for The Hammock Coast. The Depression had hit the South in earnest, and the couple employed local labor to create Brookgreen and Atalaya. They established a school for Black children and built a free medical clinic. Roads and bridges were constructed, and it was Archer who paid for electricity to be strung up the coast from Georgetown.

Anna was an award-winning sculptor and an innovator in her field. In 1932, she was the first American artist to cast sculpture from aluminum and quickly moved away from bronze. Today, a visit to Brookgreen Gardens offers a curated landscape exactly as Anna imagined it, but the amount of sculpture, on display in the gardens and inside its galleries, has continued to amass.

The astonishing collection—including 430 artists and 2,000+ works—makes Brookgreen Gardens a formidable curator of American art unequaled in the world of figurative sculpture. Three galleries feature portions of its permanent collection, and an expansive storage and research facility can be toured daily.

Superstars of Brookgreen

The outdoor sculptures at Brookgreen Gardens are installed in tremendous locales, meant to be viewed in water, against the sky, within plantings, or on a trail. A few not-to-be-missed examples include:

Diana of the Chase by Anna Hyatt Huntington, 1922
The life-sized bronze is the first of five known castings of Huntington’s depiction of Roman goddess Diana with her hound. It can be found at The Diana Pool.

Dionysus by Edward Francis McCartan, 1936
McCartan was director of sculpture at the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design in New York. The bronze Dionysus can be found at the Rosen Carolina Terrace.

Pegasus by Laura Gardin Fraser, 1954
Fraser, who was also the first woman to design a coin for the U.S. Treasury, depicts Bellerophon riding Pegasus in marble. It can be found at Lani’s Garden.

Fountain of the Muses by Carl Milles, 1954
Fifteen life-sized bronze figures are positioned individually in a reflecting pool, which can be found in front of Caroline’s Garden. Milles created each one holding an idea of inspiration.

The Saint James Triad by Richard McDermott Miller, 1996
Miller placed his rubbed bronze nude figures within polished, geometric frames. Find the trio near the Rainey Sculpture Pavilion.

Brookgreen Gardens, 1931 Brookgreen Dr., Murrells Inlet, SC. Open daily, 9:30am–5pm. $22. 843.235.6000, brookgreen.org

Take a Break in The Hammock Coast

Brookgreen Gardens sits near three charming Hammock Coast towns: Murrells Inlet, Litchfield Beach, and Pawleys Island. Don’t miss out on lunch or dinner at one of these top spots:

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