“It has been my life’s work,” said Huguenin. “And I imagine it will be my life’s work until the day I’m gone.” That work began in earnest in 1982. Huguenin, an Augusta, Ga.-based real estate attorney, owned just 10 acres at the time. By the start of 2020, he has cobbled together 993 acres, about half of which is unbuildable, king’s grant marshland.

The house Huguenin’s father built in 1953 still stands, although it typically is occupied only when visitors come for weekend hunting trips. Hugeunin intends to demolish it, opening up a sweeping view of the marsh beyond, where the Coosawhatchie, Tulifiny and Pocotaligo rivers converge to form the Broad River.

This location, with proximity to freshwater and access to the Atlantic, made it a prime spot for the rice plantation that Huguenin’s fourth-great grandfather, also named David Huguenin, started there. He purchased the heart of the property in 1782 after it was confiscated from Tory baron John Rose, for whom the plantation was likely named. Famed architect Robert Mills was among the frequent visitors to Roseland in its earliest years. So was South Carolina Congressman William Colcock, who was married on the property in 1829 to Sarah Huguenin, granddaughter of the plantation’s founder.

Roseland’s location also gave it strategic importance. Remnants of breastworks and canon placements, constructed under the supervision of Robert E. Lee at the Civil War’s dawning, are still evident on the property. Despite such precautions, Union troops overran the area in 1865. Troops of the 144th New York Volunteers under the command of Gen. William T. Sherman burned to the ground three houses on Roseland. Ironically, the sergeant in charge of the burning was also a Huguenin – a cousin of the plantation’s founder.

Roseland was no longer profitable after the war, so the family began to sell off chunks. By the time the estate passed to Huguenin’s grandfather, only about 800 to 1,000 acres remained intact. And the hard times were not over. Huguenin’s father, Edward P. Huguenin, next inherited Roseland. There, he raised cattle and bred peacocks, Muscovy ducks and several species of pheasants – “so many birds, you didn’t want to walk out in the front yard barefoot,” David Huguenin recalled.

Edward was a well-regarded citizen – Jasper County superintendent of education, a two-term state legislator and a National Guard commander, who earned a Silver Star and a Purple Heart during the Battle of the Bulge. However, unable to pay the taxes on Roseland, he began conveying large portions to escape debt. He also was trying to maintain Roseland more or less on his own.

Edward’s first wife – David’s mother, Frances Rice Huguenin – moved to Augusta, Ga., with the couple’s three children in 1962. She suffered from cerebral palsy and was largely confined to a wheelchair. However, she tried her best to support the family by baking cakes in her kitchen. Huguenin earned a degree from North Georgia College and worked seven years in the textile industry, at Spartan Mills. During the last of those years, he took on night and weekend shifts so that he could work his way through the Augusta School of Law.

“I really don’t remember when I slept,” he said. Huguenin and his partners built a successful law practice, however, and he eventually acquired the resources he would need to consolidate Roseland. But money was not his only obstacle. When Edward Huguenin died in 1982, he owned just 10 acres surrounding the house he built there in 1953. David Huguenin owned only 10 acres himself, and his siblings and an aunt also had modest holdings.

Huguenin purchased his relatives’ property from them. However, his rebuilding project might not have gone much further without a three-year court battle that allowed him to exercise an option on several hundred acres his father had sold years earlier. He lost rulings at the magistrate, circuit and appellate levels, but the S.C. Supreme Court ruled that Huguenin’s option to repurchase remained valid. Had the high court ruled otherwise, a developer was poised to build a golf course and a subdivision with several hundred homes on the property, he said.

Huguenin and his wife, Deborah, immediately put more than 150 acres under conservation easement with the Charleston-based Lowcountry Open Land Trust, and they have sought to preserve the land they acquired thereafter, as well. “It will never be developed, never be a subdivision, never see a drop of asphalt,” Huguenin said. “In fact, we’ve limited it to five homes on the entire property.”

Huguenin’s grown children – daughter Stephanie and son Patrick David – will each be allowed to build homes on the property and would become the eighth generation to live there. Not much else will be constructed on Roseland, however. Easements protect an avenue of oaks that led to one of the mansions Sherman’s troops burned, the Civil War-era breastworks and a wooded buffer along the Coosawhatchie River.

Huguenin and his wife continued to add adjoining property that comes on the market if it was part of the original plantation. They purchased a 468-acre chunk in 2003, for example, but most of the more recent additions have been considerably smaller — an acre here and there. Huguenin said he will reassemble until the day he dies, then be buried next to his mother in the family cemetery at Roseland. And on that day, he’ll rest easy: “I’ll know that one day, even after everything else around here is developed, Roseland will always be like it is now.”