Last updated: September 4, 2025
Place
Bonny Hall Trail #5 at Earnest F. Hollings Ace Basin
NPS/Elena De Marco
Quick Facts
Location:
Bonny Hall Trail, Rice Dike #5, ACE Basin area
Significance:
Former rice plantation where people who escaped on the Combahee River Raid were enslaved.
MANAGED BY:
Amenities
3 listed
Parking - Auto, Scenic View/Photo Spot, Trailhead
The Bonny Hall Trail Number 5 is managed by the US Fish and Wildlife Service as part of the Earnest F. Hollings A.C.E. Basin National Wildlife Refuge. Visitors to the refuge can see shorebirds, eagles and songbirds.
Located nearby is the Bonny Hall Plantation, which was a rice plantation in the 1800s. While the plantation house itself is privately owned, the National Wildlife Refuge preserves many of the rice fields, canals, and dikes that were used as irrigation systems on the Bonny Hall Plantation complex. These rice fields were engineered by enslaved West Africans who brought sophisticated irrigation knowledge from the regions around present-day Sierra Leone. Plantation owners on the coast of South Carolina specifically enslaved these highly skilled people to transform the Lowcountry landscape into highly profitable rice fields. During the Combahee Raid of 1863, some of the people enslaved at Bonny Hall escaped to freedom on these rice dikes that make up the modern trail system that visitors can explore today.
Located nearby is the Bonny Hall Plantation, which was a rice plantation in the 1800s. While the plantation house itself is privately owned, the National Wildlife Refuge preserves many of the rice fields, canals, and dikes that were used as irrigation systems on the Bonny Hall Plantation complex. These rice fields were engineered by enslaved West Africans who brought sophisticated irrigation knowledge from the regions around present-day Sierra Leone. Plantation owners on the coast of South Carolina specifically enslaved these highly skilled people to transform the Lowcountry landscape into highly profitable rice fields. During the Combahee Raid of 1863, some of the people enslaved at Bonny Hall escaped to freedom on these rice dikes that make up the modern trail system that visitors can explore today.