You Can Buy an $11.5 Million Plantation That's Older Than the U.S.

In 1742, nearly two decades before the American Revolution, William Byrd II, one of the colonies’ largest landowners (and slave owners), had amassed a tract in North Carolina that spanned more than 26,000 acres. He named it “Land of Eden” in what amounted to a marketing ploy to induce Europeans to cross the Atlantic and settle on his property. It didn’t work, and by 1755 Byrd’s spendthrift son was forced to sell the the land to pay off gambling debts.

By the time Arthur Dick bought it 250 years later for about $2 million in 2001, the property had passed through just six different owners’ hands but had been whittled down to about 770 acres. The original house was gone, replaced by an early 19th-century mansion. Dick, the president and chief executive officer of AdvantaClean, a Greensboro, N.C.-based environmental service company, soon set about regaining some of the land the plantation had lost. He bought several tracts from his neighbors and expanded the property to approximately 1,770 acres. He does not farm the land.