This is our third visit to Drayton Hall. Every time we visit Charleston, South Carolina, my wife and I make it a point to drive up the Ashley River Road to see Drayton Hall, Magnolia Plantation and Middleton Place. And our guide never ceases to remind us that Drayton Hall remains the only plantation house on the Ashley River to survive intact through both the Revolutionary War and the Civil War is because when Union troops came marching along the Ashley River Road and burning one plantation after another, they avoided Drayton Hall because the owner warned them that the plantation was being ravaged by the deadly yellow fever. So here stands Drayton Hall, as it looked in the 1700s and 1800s. Located on the Ashley River about 15 miles northwest of Charleston, across the Ashley River from North Charleston, it was built between 1747 and 1752 and remains an outstanding example of Palladian architecture in North America. The seven-bay double-pile plantation house is within a 630-acre site that is part of a plantation that was based on indigo and rice production and is the former site of 13 slave cabins that housed 78 slaves. Seven generations of Drayton heirs preserved the house. All the outbuildings except the large privy are gone. The house has a double projecting portico on the west facade, which faces away from the river and toward the land side approach from Ashley River Road. The floor plan features a large central entrance hall with a symmetrical divided staircase which is backed by a large salon and flanked by square and rectangular chambers. The second floor is highlighted by a large ballroom. Drayton Hall was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1960 and was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1966. Drayton Hall reminds me of Shirley, the plantation house on the James River in Virginia that also dates to colonial times, two of the finest of all surviving plantation houses in the United States.