Statement of Significance (as of designation - July 19, 1964):
This was the property of Edmund Ruffin (1794-1865), who used his plantation as a laboratory for agricultural experiments in an effort to improve on the soil-depleting agricultural practices of the ante-bellum South. An ardent pro-secessionist, he fired the first shot against Fort Sumter from Morris Island in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1861. After the collapse of the Confederacy, he took his own life at Marlbourne.