The Main House at Goodwill Plantation was built in 1858 by Edward Barnwell Heyward. It has one large central room with 12–foot ceilings and two large bedrooms on each side, each with a fireplace. Charles Heyward never made it back to the Combahee for on March 23, 1866, he died sitting on the porch at Goodwill Plantation. In the fall of 1866, Edward Barnwell Heyward and his family moved to Charleston and then later back to the Combahee.

On February 23, 1869, Edward Barnwell Heyward sold Goodwill Plantation to George T. Wickes, a northern carpetbagger from New York. After Wickes sold Goodwill in 1874, the plantation passed through many owners.

P.T. Barnum at Goodwill Plantation

On October 24, 1888, the most famous man in the world at that time, P.T. Barnum, owner of Barnum and Bailey’s Greatest Show on Earth, bought Goodwill Plantation for his granddaughter, Julia H. Clarks. From 1888 until 1891 P.T. Barnum used Goodwill Plantation as winter quarters for his circus animals. Julia Clarks died in the main house at Goodwill Plantation from child birth problems on February 10,1894.

Charles Heyward died in 1866 sitting on this porch of the Main House at Goodwill Plantation. Julia Clarks’s estate was fought over all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1910, the Clarks’s estate sold Goodwill Plantation to S.B. McMaster, who had been born in the McMaster Mansion in Columbia in 1874. His father was confederate hero Fitz William McMaster, colonel of the 17th South Carolina Infantry Unit that saved the battle of Petersburg (Battle of the Crater) from defeat. (Fitz William McMaster in 1881 united the Columbia Academy and the new Columbia School District and founded what has become Richland County School District 1.)

The McMaster Mansion was saved from Sherman’s torch by 12 women of Columbia who had made Sherman welcome in their homes before the Civil War. They went to his headquarters on Gervais Street and asked him, “Is this how you repay our hospitality by burning our homes?”

The mill house at Goodwill Plantation, as depicted in this sketch by Grover Rye, was built in 1858 and collapsed in 1993. Sherman then sent a guard to each of their houses to keep them safe from being burned. While the guard was at the McMaster Mansion, a drunken union soldier came to burn the house. The guard told the drunken soldier that Sherman did not want this house burned. The drunken soldier continued up the front steps with a burning torch and was shot to death by the Yankee guard. His body was burned in the backyard and never moved.

S.B. McMaster gained fame in 1903 when he dropped a bicycle from the top of the state’s first skyscraper, the just–completed Robertson Building (now Barringer), promising to repair the bike and give it to the first customer who made a $25 purchase at his shop. The McMaster family owned Goodwill Plantation from 1910–1995, 85 continuous years of ownership.
Inside the mill house was a shingle mill, as depicted in this sketch by Grover Rye, which ran off the main shaft. It was used to cut shingles for roofing all the buildings at Goodwill Plantation.