Rosedown Plantation
Rosedown Plantation is one of the best-preserved and best-documented plantation gardens of early nineteenth-century Louisiana. Built and maintained with the profits from and labor of uncompensated enslaved people, the ornamental gardens of the cotton plantation synthesized local ideas about the spatial organization of agricultural and residential landscapes with picturesque principles and horticultural specimens popularized in New York and Philadelphia.
Overview
Alternate Names: Rose Down
Site Dates: 1834 to present
Site Owner(s): Martha and Daniel Turnbull (1834–1896); Sarah Turnbull Bowman (1896–1914); Nellie, Empsie, Isa, and Maggie Bowman (The Misses Bowman) (1914–1956); Milton Underwood and Catherine Fondren Underwood (1956–); Gene Raymond Slivka (1994–2000); the State of Louisiana (2000–present)
Associated People: Samuel Richardson (landscape gardener); Moses; Charles; Ben; Primus; Augustus; Dave; Jane; Jim (enslaved gardeners)
Location: St. Francisville, West Feliciana Parish, LA
Condition: altered
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History
Located several miles inland on the eastern bank of the Mississippi river, the 3,455 acres of Rosedown Plantation were formed from seven tracts of land that Daniel Turnbull (1796–1861) and Martha Hilliard Barrow Turnbull (1809–1896) purchased between 1829 and 1861. The first of these purchases, which had been owned by members of Martha’s family, already contained an existing cotton plantation built and maintained by 74 enslaved people.[1] Profits from the Turnbull’s other plantations, Inheritance, Desoto, and Styopa, helped fund the construction and upkeep of Rosedown. In the 1840s and 1850s, just under 450 enslaved people worked without pay on the largest plantations owned by Daniel and Martha Turnbull.
Most information about the built landscape of Rosedown Plantation is preserved in Martha Turnbull’s garden diary, which documents a period from 1836 to 1895.[2] Martha’s diary provides insights into the plantings, maintenance, and design, of the kitchen garden, orchard, greenhouses, and ornamental gardens located closest to the main house, as well as a separate plantation garden in which she grew vegetables for the enslaved residents of Rosedown.[3] It largely ignores, however, other landscapes on the plantation, which included cotton fields, fields for fodder crops, pastures for livestock, and probably a cemetery.[4] Her journal suggests that the functional landscapes of the plantation relegated to enslaved people, cash crops, livestock, and death were gendered male, while those dedicated to cultivating food and the leisure of the plantation owners were gendered female.
Like other early nineteenth-century garden diaries, such as that of the Hudson River head gardener James Francis Brown, Martha Turnbull’s records of her garden are focused on weather and largely devoid of the stylistic terms that characterized prescriptive gardening literature. Later historians of gardens, however, have characterized the design of the ornamental gardens at Rosedown as an early and innovative southern example of picturesque elements inserted within a flat, symmetrical, axial plan that was typical of the region.[5] An avenue lined with oak trees connected the main house to the road, bisecting a rectangular garden that visitors could navigate via gently curving walks. Around the Turnbull house, geometric flower gardens featured parterres bordered with boxwoods and flowering shrubs. A kitchen garden and an orchard added in 1838 provided food for the Turnbulls to consume and sell at a local market. A variety of functional and recreational structures dotted the gardens. These included two greenhouses, one built before 1836 and the other completed in 1855, hot beds used to cultivate tropic fruits like pineapple, and cold beds. A lattice summerhouse, first mentioned in an 1858 entry but possibly built as early as 1835, stood among the flower gardens.
Texts
Images
Map
Other Resources
Louisiana State Historic Sites– Rosedown Plantation
Notes
- ↑ Nesta Jean Anderson, “Comparing Alternative Landscapes: Power Negotiations in Enslaved Communities in Louisiana and the Bahamas, an Archaeological and Historical Perspective” (PhD diss., University of Texas at Austin, 2004), 123, view on Zotero.
- ↑ Martha Barrow Turnbull, The Garden Diary of Martha Turnbull, Mistress of Rosedown Plantation, ed. Suzanne Turner (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2012), view on Zotero.
- ↑ Turnbull 2012, 145, view on Zotero. (plantation cabbages)
- ↑ Turnbull 2012, 217, view on Zotero. (graveyard)
- ↑ Donna Fricker and Suzanne Turner, “Rosedown Plantation,” National Register of Historic Places Registration Form (Baton Rouge: Division of Historic Preservation, 2005), 4, view on Zotero. See also Elaine Ware, “Formal Ornamental Gardens in the Ante-Bellum South,” Studies in Popular Culture 19, no. 2 (1996): 49–66.
