Quarter

History

The term quarter possessed at least three distinct meanings relevant to eighteenth-and nineteenth-century landscape design. The term referred to divisions in a garden or related space, such as a cemetery, a smaller tract of land within a larger holding, or, in the American context, a space devoted to lodgings associated with enslavement. Recent scholarship concerning plantation landscapes has yielded a similar conclusion regarding the multiple meanings of the term in pre-1850 America. The term was somewhat ambiguous, “referring variously to a building in which slaves were housed, the place where their houses were located, and the lands that they worked.”1

As a term that denoted subdivided, demarcated garden spaces typically arranged in geometrical shapes, “quarter” was applied to a variety of garden types, including botanic gardens, fruit and kitchen gardens, and wildernesses [Fig. 1]. The term can be found in descriptions of American gardens and in British-authored treatises, including Richard Bradley’s New Improvements of Planting and Gardening (1719–20) and William Cobbett’s The American Gardener (1819). Cobbett mentioned that in English gardening books “quarter” was used for what he called plat (see Plot). Garden quarters could take on a variety of configurations, from the rectangular plots shown in Cobbett’s plan to the elaborated subdivisions depicted in illustrations in Dézallier d’Argenville’s Theory and Practice of Gardening (1712).

The definition of quarter as a plot of land or “agricultural production unit” was related closely to its denotation as a garden space. As Carl Lounsbury observes, these “quarters could be part of, adjacent to, or quite separate and distinct from the tract on which the landowner lived.”2 At Landon Carter’s Sabine Hall in Richmond County, Va., and at Mount Vernon, for example, certain portions of the plantation were described as quarters.3 The size, organization, and appearance of such quarters corresponded to the type of agricultural production employed and the specific elements of local topography.

The use of the term to refer to a division of space within a larger complex (such as a city or estate, as noted in 1828 by Noah Webster) was closely related to its definition as residences or lodgings. Both these meanings are implied in a 1797 plan of Airy Plain in Virginia, in which Benjamin Henry Latrobe designated the space devoted to the slave residences as a “negro quarter” [Fig. 2]. The latter phrasing was more infrequent than that of slave quarter, or simply quarters.4 The creation of separate slave quarters dates largely to the end of the seventeenth century, “when the enslaved status of black people was more rigorously defined by legal codes and social practices [and] racial segregation was more strictly enforced.”5

Garden treatise literature generally ignored this use of quarter, and eighteenth-and nineteenth-century commentators rarely commented upon the arrangement of slave quarters in the context of the designed landscape. Recent scholarship has noted that such spaces helped to articulate the social mechanisms of power and labor underlying the plantation system and, therefore, had a marked impact upon the designed landscape, particularly in the southern United States.6 Site reports of archaeological excavations of plantations also provide evidence of the location, arrangement, and architecture of slave quarters (see Plantation).7

Thomas Coram’s 1800 depiction of Mulberry Plantation, near Charleston, S.C. [Fig. 3], illustrates the lodgings symmetrically placed on each side of the main approach. In this representation, the slave quarters were positioned in contrast with the monumentality of the plantation owner’s residence. The size and central location occupied by the residence underscores the social relations embedded in the slavery system. The slave lodgings, lining the roadside and leading to the front door of the residence, suggest the owner’s ability to marshal labor forces and to dominate (both physically and psychologically) the local environmental economy. Observers of the American landscape often likened these arrangements of houses and subsidiary buildings to a town or settlement, with, as Dell Upton has commented, “the planter’s house as its town hall.”8

Historical literature concerning the subject of ideal slave management directly commented upon the physical arrangement of the quarter. It included recommendations about situating quarters at some distance from the main house and in a location where the overseer could easily supervise work. Plans that permitted the circulation of air— as a means to ensure the health of occupants—were encouraged. The slave quarter sometimes included gardens and yards where residents could grow produce for their own use or bartering. In written accounts of antebellum America, however, the cultural practices of African-Americans were often ignored, and so it is difficult to reconstruct the historical appearance of their gardens of this period.9

-- Anne L. Helmreich