The Singleton family had been accumulating land and enslaved labor in the South Carolina lowcountry for a century before Kensington's walls went up. Englishman Matthew Singleton acquired 1,250 acres east of the Wateree River in 1762, growing rice and indigo with enslaved labor. By his death in 1787, he owned over 3,000 acres. His son John turned cotton and shipping into a fortune and left his heirs eight properties, more than 13,000 acres, and $30,000 in cash. The family's wealth continued to multiply through cotton, railroads, and political connections -- Richard Singleton was the brother of Angelica Singleton Van Buren, daughter-in-law of President Martin Van Buren. When Richard's son Matthew Richard Singleton married Martha Rutledge Kinloch in 1844, it joined two of South Carolina's most powerful families. Matthew Richard renamed the property from Headquarters to Kensington and hired Charleston architects Edward Culliatt Jones and Francis D. Lee to design a mansion worthy of the family's ambitions.

Among the 281 people enslaved at Kensington was a boy named Jacob Stroyer, born around 1849. In his autobiography, My Life in the South, Stroyer described being trained as a horse rider at age five, taught to compete in races sanctioned by the South Carolina Jockey Club. The training consisted of severe whippings every time he was thrown. The first beating brought a devastating realization: his parents could not protect him. His mother, he later wrote, did not come back to stop the overseer. That was the moment he understood that he and his family were, in his words, "doomed to cruel treatment through life, and was defenceless." Stroyer cared for 15 horses, 80 head of cattle, 60 sheep, 217 pigs, and 28 mules. Other enslaved workers planted and harvested 7,000 bushels of corn, 3,500 bushels of oats, and 405 bales of cotton in 1850 alone. The estate's 12,000-square-foot mansion -- with its glass skylight, intricate plasterwork, and cast-iron railings -- was the visible product of this labor.

Matthew Richard Singleton died of tuberculosis in August 1854, leaving Martha with three children, an unfinished mansion, and debts to nearly 70 creditors. Floods and droughts had decimated the crops. Martha's response was ruthless and effective. She sold 38 enslaved laborers, 400 acres of land, $2,300 worth of furniture, and the racehorses. Then she broke from social convention, negotiating business deals in person, signing purchase receipts under her own name, and reporting census data herself. By 1860, she had grown Kensington's cash value from $30,000 to $100,000, acquired an additional 1,600 acres, and increased her enslaved workforce from 281 to 465 people. She diversified the plantation's output into wheat, rice, peas, beans, sweet potatoes, hay, and sorghum, reducing dependence on the volatile cotton market. Jacob Stroyer remembered her as "a good deal worse" than her husband had been.

When Sherman's army approached Columbia in 1865, Martha hid her livestock in a swamp, gathered her mother and a few necessities, and fled. The Union troops destroyed the nearby Kingville railway depot but left the mansion standing. After the war, the Singletons returned to find their world inverted: the people they had once enslaved were now sharecroppers and tenant farmers on the same land. Martha moved to Columbia in 1878, and her son Richard sold the estate in 1910. Over the following decades, Kensington passed through the hands of the Hamer family, the U.S. Farm Security Administration during World War II, and the Lanham family, who stored farm equipment in the mansion's 29 rooms. By the time architects surveyed it in 1980, pigeons roosted in the parlors and snakes nested under the dome.

Union Camp purchased Kensington in 1981 for $2.5 million and spent approximately $1 million restoring the mansion, which opened to the public in 1985. The Scarborough-Hamer Foundation, overseen by descendants of the Scarborough, Hamer, Singleton, and Stroyer families, ran tours four times a day, three days a week, for over two decades. Jacob Stroyer, the boy who was whipped for falling off horses, had become a licensed minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. He died in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1908 and was buried in Greenlawn Cemetery. His autobiography remains one of the most vivid firsthand accounts of plantation slavery. An ice storm in February 2014 damaged the mansion, and tours were discontinued. The foundation has since dissolved. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places since 1971, Kensington stands quiet now -- a place where the architecture celebrates ambition and the brickwork remembers the hands that built it.