The Allston family’s fortunes were greatly diminished and never fully recovered. Allston’s daughter Elizabeth Pringle published the book A Woman Rice Planter, under the pen name Patience Pennington (really), which detailed her various travails; when she died, her heirs finally sold the property to the Waddell family in 1926, who held on to it for nearly 60 years.

The House
By the time the Constances purchased the land, virtually every aspect of the property was in a state of disrepair.

“The [Waddell] family only came there on weekends to shoot, when duck season was on,” Constance says. “It needed a lot of love.” The house reeked of tobacco smoke (the walls and ceilings had tobacco smoke stains), and the plaster walls were flaking.

Constance says that he approached the house—some parts of which were more than 200 years old—with a single goal in mind: to preserve as much of it as possible.

“The contractor came to me and said, ‘Mr. Constance, we’re going to have to remove the wooden laths,’ ” he says of the thin slats of wood used on walls to hold plaster. “I said: ‘Over my dead body.’ These laths have absorbed the spirit of everyone who ever lived or worked in this house, and I didn’t want one splinter removed that wasn’t absolutely necessary.” A solution involving wire mesh placed over the laths was duly found.

The house is 10,000 square feet, with 10 bedrooms and eight and a half baths. It’s built on four stories; the ground floor is brick, and was historically used by servants, while the second floor is high enough that residents can look down the bluff to the Pee Dee River, which runs through the plantation. (“It was built that high for the breeze,” says Constance.)

They did a minimal amount of remodeling; there’s a piazza that runs around three sides of the house. The rear had been walled off, Constance says, so they took down the wall and built a row of window panes. The couple also changed the position of the breakfast room and took down a tower of bathrooms that had been tacked on to the home sometime in the 20th century.

Other than that, the house is much as it was 150 years ago. The interiors have been impeccably maintained, he says, and a kitchen on the property even has a cooktop whose iron was made on the plantation.

The Property
Constance estimates there are at least nine original outbuildings, all of which he restored. The carriage house is now used for garden equipment, and the house occupied by the master slave (who was in charge of overseeing other slaves) was turned into a guest cottage; even the threshing mill was updated and shored up.

The couple added 80 acres to the property. Five were occupied by a hunting lodge owned by a group of businessmen (“it was a mess,” Constance says, “and we didn’t want someone to come along and build a 7-Eleven or something”), and 75 acres were owned by a descendant of one of the Allstons’ slaves. When he put the property up for sale, the Constances snapped it up.