The Wedge Plantation, which is also known as The Wedge or the William Lucas House, is a plantation about 5 mi (8 km) east of McClellanville in Charleston County, South Carolina. The plantation is a wedge-shaped property between the Harrietta Plantation and the Fairfield Plantation. The plantation house was built around 1830. It is located off US Highway 17 near the Santee River. It was named to the National Register of Historic Places on September 18, 1975.
The house was built by a rice planter William Lucas around 1826. Lucas was a son of Jonathan Lucas, who invented a rice-pounding mill. It remained in the Lucas family for the next hundred years. It was a working rice plantation up to about 1914.
In 1929, Mr. and Mrs. Elbridge Chadwick acquired the plantation and restored the house with the assistance of architect Albert Simons. In 1948, Mr. and Mrs. Charles H. Woodward purchased it for a winter home.
Dr. and Mrs. Richard B. Dominick owned the Wedge Plantation from 1966 to 1976. During the ten-years of his life there, Dominick collected over 25,000 moths and 1,000 butterflies on the plantation. The Richard B. Dominick Moth and Butterfly Collection resides at the University of South Carolina's McKissick Museum in Columbia, South Carolina.[10][11] Richard Dominick established the Wedge Entomological Research Foundation for the publication of the Moths of North America North of Mexico.[12]Richard Dominick died at The Wedge in May, 1976. His estate owned the property for another six years.
In the 1970s, The Wedge was purchased by the State of South Carolina for "about $1 million." It became the University of South Carolina's International Center for Public Health Research for the study of insect-borne diseases.[ This program was closed in 1995 when funding for it expired and was not renewed. The University then leased The Wedge until 2014 for hunting and other uses, including the 2009 Kevin Costner film The New Daughter .
Attempts to sell the plantation have failed. The university's board of trustees determined that the annual cost of maintaining the plantation at $385,000 in 2013, but the university allots only $100,000 yearly as of 2020. In 2014, the plantation was put up for sale at $4 million, but no offers were made. A subsequent attempt to find a buyer using a real estate agent also failed. An appraisal of the plantation's value included $500,000 in needed repairs. On July 3, 2020, the university opened the bidding process again with the minimum bid pegged at $3.2 million, with bids due by August 20, 2020