[4] The founder and first owner was James Withers (1710-1756), a brick maker in Charleston, South Carolina who also became a planter.

He developed a plantation along the Sampit River for indigo and rice from 1734 onward, based on the use of enslaved labor.

[5][7] Francis Wither appointed his son-in-law, Dr. Alexius Mador Forster, III, MD (1815-1879), to manage the plantation, but it fell into disrepair after the American Civil War.

Combined with struggling with the change to free labor, planters faced a sudden lack of economic resources.

[7] Friendfield Plantation passed out of the Withers family in 1897 when Elizabeth Hunt Warham Forster (1820-1906) sold it to B. Walker Cannon.

[6] But during the early 20th century, thousands of African Americans left the South to go north in the Great Migration to industrial cities, seeking better opportunities and an escape from Jim Crow oppression.