The Prince Frederick Chapel known as Old Gunn Church, is a symbol of the fall of slavery-based rice production. In the surrounding community of Plantersville, the plantations generated immense wealth for white plantation owners and funded much of the Civil War, including the Allston plantation, which was owned by Governor Allston. The church’s construction started twice. Its stones were placed by the experienced enslaved stone masons and carpenters who expertly had carved polishing and grinding stones, constructed intricate winnowing houses. Twice, it burned: at the start and the end of the civil war. Not by Union forces, but by lightning. The ornaments along its windows represent a hubris that rice planters all inhabited: that the riches and proceeds that could be produced by rice could somehow be separated like the chaff from the evils of chattel slavery. That the robbery of the African work methods, knowledge, engineering, and sustenance that allowed rice production to thrive in South Carolina could be occluded and entombed in cornices and cathedrals. Nature has a way of retaking and deconstructing.
