Plantation

History

Noah Webster’s 1828 definition of plantation includes three meanings relevant to landscape architecture, all of which were in use from the seventeenth through mid-nineteenth centuries: a cultivated estate, a settlement in a new country, and a ground planted with trees, as opposed to naturally occurring growth. Americans were familiar with all these meanings. The term was used to describe a settlement or town, such as Salem or “New Plimouth,” as well as the individual holdings of a planter, as conveyed by an anonymous writer in 1626. Virginia landowner William Byrd II also described his estate, Westover, as a plantation and wrote about raising plantations of trees in a letter to the plant collector Peter Collinson. Timothy Dwight’s 1796 travel account of New England used all three meanings of the term, describing the region’s towns, the estate of Cobble Hill in Charlestown, Mass., and groupings of trees or groves each as “gay and fertile” plantations. The use of the term “plantation” to describe a colony or new settlement was prevalent only in the earliest colonial period, and it seems to have faded by the late eighteenth century.

Most frequently, however, plantation referred to a cultivated estate, a peculiarly American use of the term, as both Ephraim Chambers (1741–43) and Webster (1828) noted. It was applied to farms of all sizes throughout the English-speaking colonies during the period under study: Green-springs, William Fitzhugh’s estate in James City County, Va. (1686); Fitterasso, Dr. Baron’s estate in Charleston, S.C. (1799); Hampton, in Baltimore County, Md. (1808) [Fig. 1]; and Wye House, Col. Edward Lloyd’s estate in Talbot County, Md. (1825). Webster noted that from Maryland northward such sites were called farms rather than plantations, but descriptions indicate that such distinctions were not always made consistently, at least by traveling observers. The term often became part of the proper name of many estates such as John Couper and James Hamilton Couper’s Hopeton Plantation, near Darien, Ga.; Hugh Fraser Grant’s Elizafield Plantation, in Glynn County, Ga.; and Roger Moore’s Orton Plantation, near Southport, N.C.

The word “plantation” today conjures up perhaps one of the most evocative images of the American landscape: vast tracts of land surrounding elegant mansions of the antebellum South. This image, however, with a majestic Greek Revival house, spreading lawns, and extensive fields worked by legions of slaves is more a product of nineteenth-and twentieth-century fiction and film than an accurate description of the antebellum southern landscape. In actuality the southern planter’s house was much more likely to be a one- or two-room log house with a long porch, shed behind, and various scattered service buildings. Even so, large plantations did exist throughout the South, although they were in the minority, and they elicited some of the most detailed descriptions and images. Plans such as those of Marigny Plantation in New Orleans [Fig. 2] and of Mount Vernon [Fig. 3] illustrate the variety of arrangements of plantation landscapes. Their sizes ranged from thousands of acres, particularly for early sites purchased when land was abundant, to a few hundred acres in areas where size was restricted either by the intensive labor needed to harvest the crop or by the limits of arable land. The particular architecture and arrangement of the buildings of southern plantations depended largely on the principle crop (such as sugar, tobacco, rice, or cotton), which varied regionally and changed through time with the introduction of technological improvements such as the cotton gin and steam-powered mill.

The major elements of plantation landscapes generally focused upon the main dwelling, which was called variously the mansion, seat, or great house. The main dwelling was both the physical and symbolic seat of the planter and, where possible, was maintained as a visual statement of the social hierarchy of the plantation [Fig. 4]. Work-related buildings included those associated with domestic functions (such as kitchens, dairies, and icehouses that were usually clustered near the main house), and also those related to agricultural harvesting and processing (such as barns, mills, and threshing houses). The final component of the plantation’s architecture was quarters for the plantation’s labor force, largely made up of slaves and hired hands in the smaller farms or plantations of the Mid-Atlantic and the Northeast. As noted, the arrangement of various services and outbuildings depended upon the type of crop, but plantations were frequently described as villages and given the appearance of buildings clustered near a core dwelling, as illustrated in Francis Guy’s Perry Hall (1805) [Fig. 5]. In the Virginia and Maryland Tidewater, plantations were often divided into quarters or farms (as at Mount Vernon), and field slaves resided in housing located in these individual farms. In cases such as Mulberry Plantation, seen in Thomas Coram’s 1800 painting [Fig. 6], slave dwellings were constructed in two rows, each flanking the entrance to the main house. Buildings for slaves’ welfare also might have included a hospital, dining hall, chapel, laundry, bakery, and kitchen.

Recent scholarship has shown that slaves and white planters and families understood and used the plantation landscape quite differently. On one hand, with its segregation of slaves and whites, its principles of surveillance, and its orientation toward production, the structure of the landscape itself was organized to maintain the discipline and hierarchy of enforced labor. The actual habitation of the landscape by the slave population, however, created new systems of paths, activity areas, and social groups that circumvented the formal layout of the plantation and also enforced the autonomy and identity of the slave community itself [Fig. 7].

When used in the third sense identified by Webster as a cultivated area of trees and shrubs, “plantation” operated as a generic term for any planting of trees and shrubs or grouping that might include clumps, copses, groves, orchards, shrubberies, thickets, wildernesses, or woods, connoting a planned arrangement. For an example of this usage, see statements by William Marshall (1803), G. Gregory (1816), and George William Johnson (1847). This type of plantation carried both agricultural and aesthetic connotations. William Byrd II, for example, in 1730 placed a plantation of quick-growing trees at his estate to protect his vineyard from strong winds. British treatise-writer William Marshall discussed such borders or screens of trees as ornamental. Using plantations of trees to disguise boundaries and to imbue the landscape with a naturalistic appearance was an important component of eighteenth-century English landscape gardening. Early nineteenth-century American treatise writer Bernard M’Mahon (1806) likewise insisted upon the inclusion of plantations in designs for pleasure grounds, championing their use as frames for the lawn in the form of shrubbery, clumps, and thickets. He also advocated decoration for the outer parts of the grounds, where they could provide a screen of trees and shrubs and could shelter walks. M’Mahon’s British contemporary J. C. Loudon also promoted the use of plantations “to give beauty and variety to general scenery.” In The New American Gardener (1828), André Parmentier provided even more specific instructions for the composition of artful plantations of trees by suggesting that designers imitate landscape painters with the use of trees of light-colored foliage in plantations located farthest from the house in order to emulate the lighter hues found in the background of landscape paintings. The arrangement of plantations according to various styles is illustrated in several treatises [Fig. 8].

A wide variety of plant material was used in ornamental plantations. Parmentier, for example, recommended fruit and ordinary ornamental trees to create “beauty and interest.” James E. Teschemacher, in an 1835 essay in the Horticultural Register, recommended ornamental forest trees interspersed with pine and fir trees to create dense foliage that could screen the lawn. Edward Sayers (1838) advised planting only native forest trees because of their guaranteed adaptability and health. A. J. Downing (1849), however, argued that plantations executed in the modern style should include rare and foreign species, as similarly promoted by Loudon’s gardenesque style (see Gardenesque).

Some treatise writers and designers recommended particular shrubs for plantations. In 1759 Philip Miller suggested the use of “plantations of flowering shrubs, intermixed with laurels, and some Evergreens” to disguise bare fences. Nearly one hundred years later, the American Thomas Bridgeman (1832) echoed Miller’s advice. The designer of the 1800 plan for the Elias Hasket Derby House in Salem, Mass., employed a “Plantation of Shrubs” to frame the elliptical walks, and also to provide a screen between the garden and the adjoining kitchen garden and street [Fig. 9]. The aesthetic and material importance of plantations perhaps was summed up best by Sayers, who in 1837 argued that ornamental plantations of forest trees “give a mellow and finished cast to the surrounding scenery, and impress the traveller with an idea of the additional value of property.” Plantations of trees were perceived as a commutable resource and, therefore, seen as signs of wealth and economic strength.

-- Anne L. Helmreich, Elizabeth Kryder-Reid, and Therese O'Malley