CHARLOTTE, N.C. — If visitors come to Rosedale Plantation expecting to see something like Tara from "Gone With the Wind," they will leave disappointed.
Rosedale was grand for its time and place — the backcountry of Mecklenburg County in 1815. If you want to see something that looks like Tara, said Camille Smith, go to Charleston. Smith is a docent for the plantation.
Rosedale, a green oasis dotted with ancient trees and bushes, sits on 8 1/2 acres of land on busy North Tryon Street, about three miles from the heart of downtown. The house was built by Archibald Frew, who came to this area in the 1790s.
"He and his sister, Sarah, came," Smith said as she led a recent tour. "Both were in their early 20s. They came with money, quite a lot of money." Historians think that the Frews had inherited their wealth from their parents and headed to this area, where they may have had relatives, from the coast. Both began to buy property.
Archibald Frew's plantation spread across 911 acres, and on his land he built a big, three-story house, with fine details. He brought in artisans to paint the heart-pine doors to resemble mahogany and a mantel in the front room to resemble marble. He had molding carved, piece by piece, to form a garland border that decorates the front room.
"There were obviously signs of Archibald Frew putting a lot of money into it," Smith said. Locals disapproved.
Slaves most likely built the house, said Karen McConnell, Rosedale's curator of education, although they don't have any records of the construction. "Slaves did most of the manual labor for that sort of thing," she said. They do know that andirons that passed down through the family and are still in the house were made by a slave.
Following a common practice of his time, Frew hid a newspaper within the mortar of the chimney to date his house. A scrap of the newspaper with the date, 1815, and his signature is now displayed behind a frame. The newspaper was from Richmond, Va.; Charlotte didn't have a newspaper in 1815, Smith said.
Before the tour began, Smith explained what the backcountry was like when Frew moved there.
Most of the settlers were poor, subsistence farmers who lived in log cabins with dirt floors. Some people built plantations, but they raised just enough food for the people who lived on them, Smith said.
"They did not generally sell crops for money."
During their early years in the area, Archibald Frew ran a general store and Sarah Frew married. After her first child was born, her husband died, and she then married William Davidson, the richest man in the county. His plantation was much grander than Rosedale, and he owned about 80 slaves. Frew owned just a few.
Frew kept his store and also became a federal tax collector for Mecklenburg County. He collected licensing money from local merchants, who drew their income from area farmers. With Frew's job came the responsibility of making up any tax shortfalls.
"That was usually not a problem," Smith said. At least, not until 1815, the year Frew finished his house. That April, on the Indonesian island of Sumbawa, the biggest volcanic eruption in modern history began. The eruption of Mount Tambora sent so much ash into the atmosphere that 1816 became known as "the year without a summer."
In Mecklenburg County, the cold summer stunted crops, leaving farmers with no money to buy from merchants. Merchants couldn't pay their taxes.
"Archibald was liable for 27,000 and some dollars," Smith said. Frew couldn't pay, even when the debt was reduced to $6,000. The government seized his house and put it up for auction. Davidson, his brother-in-law, bought it and allowed Frew to remain there until his death in 1824. The house stayed empty until 1827, when one of Frew's nieces, Harriet, married David Caldwell, a doctor. He bought Rosedale from her father, and the descendants that lived in the house until it closed were hers.
Harriet Caldwell died of erysipelas, a skin infection that she caught from a traveler who stopped at the house. When she lay ill, she asked that her husband bring Cherry, one of the plantation's former slaves, back to bring up her children. Cherry, Smith said, smoked a pipe, and David Caldwell didn't allow smoking in the house.
Cherry slept in an upstairs room, where she would sit near the fireplace and smoke after Caldwell retired for the night, Smith said. She blew smoke up the chimney so that Caldwell wouldn't smell it.
Today, visitors can make a request in advance for a tour led by a costumed docent who will tell of plantation life from the point of view of Cherry and other slaves who worked there.
Through the years, Rosedale's occupants made some changes but left the basic structure intact. On one side, they removed stairs and doors and replaced them with windows. They removed the rotting portico and the shutters. They painted the gaudy yellow trim white. They turned the downstairs master bedroom into a kitchen.
The last Caldwell descendant moved out of the house on Dec. 31, 1986, Smith said. Restoration began the next day and went on until 1993, when the house opened for tours. The project was complex and expensive, McConnell said, and workers kept running into problems. Disaster struck when a huge support beam, riddled by termites, collapsed. Plaster walls crumbled, and a chimney collapsed.
Today, the old chimney bricks, made by slaves, form the basement floor. Bars on the basement windows are original and practical.
"They didn't pen farm animals in," Smith said. "There was cooking going on down here."
The second-floor portico that rotted away in the 1800s has been rebuilt. Walls are whole again, except for a cutout left to show visitors how the house was constructed. Roman numerals carved into the laths showed workers which pieces went where.
The house has been returned to its original look, with the lemon-yellow trim, although the exterior could use a new coat of paint. The master bedroom, which later owners had converted to a kitchen, is a bedroom once more. The original French wallpaper, which Frew bought from Philadelphia, covers walls in three rooms. Although the wallpaper is faded and stained, its designs are still visible.
So is the graffiti written by schoolboys who boarded at Rosedale while attending a classical academy nearby. They wrote names, dates and phrases and drew faces atop the paper.
The original paint, now discolored, and plaster, now cracked, are visible on the third floor, which is set up like a classroom. A small room behind it served as a home for a tutor who taught the children of the house.
"It was miserably hot in the summer, and it had no fireplace," Smith said. One of Archibald Frew's daughters came back to her old home as a tutor, Smith said.
Outside the house, which is sparsely furnished, remnants of earlier eras remain. Some of the boxwoods that Archibald Frew planted survive, as do some mulberry trees that Caldwell planted. Caldwell was one of several people in the county who tried to start a silk industry, and mulberry leaves are the diet staple for silkworms. The trees grew, but the venture failed.
A swamp chestnut oak, planted in 1984, shades the picnic area, and a 300-year-old tulip poplar stands next to its twin, felled by the winds from Hurricane Hugo in 1989. The downed tree, its roots intact, still puts out leaves.
Janice Gaston can be reached at jgaston@wsjournal.com