"Belvidere is underwater too deep for any eye but that of memory to reach," begins Anne Sinkler Fishburne's reverential recollections of her ancestral home. Located between the Santee River and Eutaw Creek near present-day Eutaw Springs, South Carolina, Belvidere Plantation once produced Santee long-staple cotton (a hybrid of the famed Sea Island cotton) and short-staple cotton on its nearly eight hundred acres of rich lowcountry soil and served as the home of the Sinkler family from the 1770s until the 1940s. The author's great-grandmother Margaret Cantey Sinkler had an elegant two-story...