Copyright The Washington Post Company Jul 27, 2003

On a recent summer day at historic Shirley Plantation on the James River, polo ponies kicked up clods of dirt, politely applauded by the creme de la creme of Richmond society. A breeze gently lifted the branches of a 300-year-old willow oak tree that Robert E. Lee is said to have played under as a boy.

On the sidelines, the 6-foot-6 Charles Hill Carter III, 41, towered over ladies in their flowered hats and gentlemen in madras jackets.

With his dirty sneakers and wraparound sunglasses, Carter hardly appears the heir to one of the country's oldest and grandest plantation homes. Like his father, he's occasionally been mistaken for the gardener.

But since he took over running the plantation from his aging parents, Carter has proven a soft-spoken but fierce keeper of the family's legacy. Shirley Plantation, a national historic landmark founded in 1613, stands on a bluff near Richmond. Considered one of the finest examples of colonial architecture in the state, it attracts 50,000 visitors a year.

Spurred on by the fear that changing inheritance laws threaten land that has been in his family for more than three centuries, Carter in recent years has launched a number of money-making ventures at the 330-acre Shirley Plantation and adjacent 300 acres that have raised the ire of environmentalists, historians and neighbors. Some critics say that Carter is making a mockery of the storied history he purports to protect, and that if he can't afford to keep the property, he should sell it.

The challenge Carter faces is not unusual among landed gentry in the United States or abroad. Because of the burden of upkeep, steep inheritances taxes and the vagaries of time, few of Virginia's great houses remain with their founding families, said Calder Loth, a historian with the Virginia Department of Historic Resources.

Carter struck a deal with the Woodrow Wilson Bridge project under which he received $1.9 million to take from the Potomac River 382,000 cubic yards of dredged mud that he used to create a soybean field. He economized by using equipment he leased for the mud project to grade a new polo field, which he rents out for matches.

His decision to allow Waste Management Inc. to build a garbage port on the property -- the firm's only port in the state -- spurred a statewide uproar over leaky garbage barges on the James River and a protracted legal battle that was resolved Friday, when a state board imposed new regulations on barging. That paved the way for Waste Management to resume bringing in millions of tons out-of- state garbage through the port, less than a half-mile from where tourist buses unload visitors. There is no word as to when the garbage shipments will start again.

"I'm the oldest, and that's my job -- to preserve, protect and pass on," said Carter, whose baby face and sleepy Southern accent belie a grittier business sense.

But Carter's critics -- especially the anti-garbage contingent -- say that his single-minded mission to keep Shirley Plantation in the family will have disastrous long-term effects. They see a future of smelly trash trucks thundering across the property.

"It is perfectly ironic, and tragic, that the people who inherited Shirley Plantation have used the cost of maintaining the property as a pretext for this enterprise that desecrates this majestic stretch of the James River," said Sterling Rives, a lawyer in nearby Hanover County.

"If all of the money paid by tourists and schoolchildren to visit the property is not enough to support them, they really should sell it. This use places a huge stigma on Shirley and the James."

Others are even less charitable.

"They could probably care less what the neighbors think or what the tourists think," grumbled Jerry Cable, a Richmond restaurateur.

When Carter was a boy, he woke every morning to the light glinting off the slow-moving James River and says he always knew his house was special.

"I attribute all my character abnormalities to having 50,000 tourists through my living room each year," he said. Shirley was and is a working farm -- with acres of cotton, corn, wheat and soybeans. Carter drove his first tractor at 7 and gave his first tour three years later.

Early colonists from England established the tobacco plantation as early as 1613, and its grand brick Queen Anne-style house was built in 1723 as a wedding gift from the owner to his daughter and new son-in-law, John Carter, the son of the famed Virginia landholder Robert "King" Carter. One of Shirley Plantation's noted features is the three-story walnut staircase that has no visible means of support.

Ann Hill Carter, the mother of Robert E. Lee, was born and raised there, and Lee was schooled with his cousins in one of its outbuildings.

Shirley Plantation survived fierce fighting during the Civil War and was a field hospital for wounded Union soldiers in 1862. The silver that sits in the dining room survived Union looting because the Carters wrapped it in burlap and hid it in the property's wells.

"Shirley is obviously one of the greatest architectural icons of Virginia," Loth said. "It's a very imposing brick mansion with some of the finest paneling and the most impressive staircase of any house of its period in the country."

Loth said only about four of the state's 30 or so grand homes remain with the original heirs. Shirley Plantation's tourism revenue is about $500,000 a year, and its expenses exceed that, Carter said, but he wouldn't specify by how much. Its crops have been losing money.

"It's a daunting task unless you're independently wealthy, and I don't think they have enough to sit back and not do anything," said Don Charles, executive director of the Historic Richmond Foundation. "I'm sure they'd love to ride around in their Bentleys and make their field hands mow the grass, but the Carter family is very hands- on."

Carter's parents, Charles Hill Carter II, 83, and Helle, moved their family -- Charles III and a younger brother and sister -- to the mansion's upper two floors in 1952, when they opened the house to tourists. Carter and his parents still live in the home, and Carter's siblings are involved in the family business.

The plantation has been one of the region's biggest tourist attractions since it opened to the public.

When the legal fracas surrounding the garbage port halted out-of- state trash shipments in 1998, Carter used the dock to import tourists, cattle and 174 shipments of the Potomac River dredge. The mud was dried out, leveled and made into agricultural fields and wetlands. Last year's test corn crop yielded a bountiful 200 bushels to the acre.

Mike Baker, environmental construction manager for the Wilson Bridge project, said: "I think he's trying to make the land work for them. He's trying to keep the plantation in the family. That's his life's role."

Carter said he is constantly thinking about new ways to use his family's land, such as the polo field, which he dreamed up as a restoration project in keeping with a 1742 plat that showed the area was an enclosed park for carriage horses.

Now that the garbage shipments can resume, sources said he stands to make about 70 cents on every ton of trash barged into the port.

State officials estimate that amount could reach about 1 million tons annually, while environmentalists fear that it could be three times that amount.

Carter insists that the garbage -- which will be trucked from the port to a nearby landfill -- won't have a negative impact on the historic home.

"My family's been here 31/2 centuries," he said. "People must think we're trying to destroy Shirley . . . but that's not what we're about. We're trying to protect Shirley. The trash will not affect Shirley whatsoever. Anybody who thinks otherwise is crazy."

Local environmentalists disagree, saying that even new regulations requiring the garbage containers to be sealed don't guarantee the river's ecological safety.

When such pressures get to be too much for Carter, he says, he escapes to the plantation's swamp, where beavers and muskrats swim amid arrow arum and saltbush, as they have for centuries.

"I don't believe you can walk calmly through life without stress," Carter said. "Yes, there's a lot of responsibility, not wanting to be the guy in the 11th generation who dropped the ball and lost the place. But it's a beautiful place, and I feel an identity with my ancestors. Not many people have that."