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.[6] 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.[7] A lattice summerhouse, first mentioned in an 1858 entry but possibly built as early as 1835, stood among the flower gardens.[8]
Around the edges of these gardens, the grounds of Rosedown Plantation contained living quarters and a church for enslaved people, a doctor’s office, a barn, and a milkshed.[9] Based on historic aerial photos, oral histories, and archaeological finds dateable to the period between 1820 and 1860, archaeologist Nesta Jean Anderson located the site of Rosedown’s slave quarters in a depression to the northwest of the Turnbull house, between the main drive of the plantation and Alexander Creek.[10]
Early inspiration for the Rosedown Plantation gardens would have come from a variety of descriptions, images, and firsthand experiences. The Turnbulls owned general works on gardening and agriculture by such notable figures as John Claudius Loudon, and Andrew Jackson Downing, and may also have been familiar with gardening literature adapted for the American South by Jacques-Felix Lelièvre (1795–1854), in French, and the nurseryman and plantation owner Thomas Affleck (1812–1868), in English.[11] Their library also contained more specialized works, like Robert Leuchars’s Practical Treatise on the Construction, Heating, and Ventilation of Hot-Houses, first printed in 1850.[12] The entrance hall of the main house was decorated with a panoramic Joseph Dufour wallpaper that depicted a dramatic landscape, one of many French imports that may also have shaped the taste of Martha and Daniel Turnbull.[13] They must also have found ideas in firsthand experience of leisure landscapes, which the Turnbulls encountered in their seasonal travels. To escape the Louisiana heat and outbreaks of yellow fever, the Turnbulls summered in Saratoga Springs, New York, and after 1850 in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia.[14]
In 1851, the Turnbull family embarked on a tour of Europe that reflected their taste in garden design and informed Martha’s approach to the Rosedown Plantation gardens in following years. Their itinerary included Liverpool Botanic Garden, Versailles, and Florence, offering them the opportunity to visit a variety of public and palatial gardens. Possibly inspired by one of Loudon’s illustrations of an “Italian walk,” [Fig. __], Martha purchased twelve statues for the garden from F. Leopold Pisani in Florence, maker of marble and alabaster sculptures for wealthy travelers, which she installed throughout the garden upon her return.[15] These included mythological figures as well as female allegorical personifications of Asia, Africa, Europe, and America.[16] The seashell-encrusted rockery that Martha added in 1858 was probably also inspired by features that she observed on her journey.[17]
Prior to the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861, most of the construction and maintenance of Rosedown Plantation was undertaken by enslaved people. While the gardens of rich plantation owners like the Turnbulls were often assumed to have been designed by European immigrant landscape gardeners (view text), the only professional gardener who can be identified in Martha Turnbull’s diary is Samuel Richardson, a landscape gardener who lived in Bayou Sara in the 1840s and left the service of Martha Turnbull in November of 1847.[18] His advertisements in the local newspaper cite the Turnbulls of Rosedown among his references, as well as Isaac Johnson (1803–1853), the governor of Louisiana and owner of Fairview Plantation on Bayou Sara, David Austin at Bayou Sara, and Martha’s nephew Robert Hilliard Barrow (1824–1878), owner of the Rosale Plantation near St. Francisville (view text). By 1868, a gardener’s house stood on the plantation grounds, although Martha’s diary never mentions the title of head gardener.[19]
With the exception of her children Sarah (1831–1914) and William (1829–1856), most of the people named in Martha’s diary prior to the Civil War can be identified with enslaved individuals listed in an 1858 succession document: Moses (age 21), Charles (17); or an 1862 inventory of enslaved people: Ben, Primus (28), Augustus (16?), Dave (17?), Jane (28 or 31), and Jim (65 or 66?).[20] Charles may have specialized in propagating and potting greenhouse plants, Jane and Moses grafted fruit trees using a technique known as budding, and Ben sold vegetables and other produce at a nearby town market (view text). Daniel Turnbull’s journal entries from 1860 frequently mention “invalids in garden,” suggesting that the enslaved people whom the Turnbulls regularly forced to work in the gardens at Rosedown had disabilities or illnesses that precluded more physically demanding tasks.[21]
Early gardening literature from the region suggests that the number of enslaved people forced to work in the Turnbull gardens was atypically high, perhaps a consequence of the size and wealth their plantations. Daniel Turnbull ranked among the “extra heavy” plantation owners of West Feliciana, one of the richest parishes in Louisiana, in which enslaved African Americans outnumbered white people five to one (view text). Thomas Affleck, owner of a nursery in Washington, Mississippi outside of Natchez, asserted in the 1851 edition of his Southern Rural Almanac and Plantation and Garden Calendar, “Very rarely is any assistance given by the plantations hands, the whole [kitchen] garden being kept in fine order by house-servants, during their leisure time.”[22] Contrary to Affleck’s claims, large groups of enslaved people carried out labor intensive tasks in the gardens at Rosedown, especially during the busiest spring and fall months. One entry from April 1856 in Martha’s diary states “I had 18 negroes picking strawberries” (view text), while another from March 1860 records “Jim has had 15 hands cleaning Garden for a month” (view text).
Martha Turnbull acquired the plants and seeds for her gardens from both long distance and local sources. The nursery of Robert Buist in Philadelphia was a preferred source for many of the seeds and plants for Rosedown, possibly by way of local nurserymen and importers in Louisiana, but Martha also bought from the nursery of Colonel Hebron near Vicksburg, Mississippi; Makenzie in Philadelphia; William Prince in Flushing, New York; and a nursery in Long Island.[23] Other plants and cuttings she acquired through exchanges with the owners of neighboring plantations, including Mrs. Mathews of Oakley Plantation, Mr. Fort of Catalpa Plantation, and possibly Judge Thomas Butler of the Cottage Plantation, each of whom also had extensive gardens.[24]
Although Martha participated in the economy of plants and ideas that emerged in Philadelphia and New York, her diary reveals that her own ideas about gardening were mediated by local practicalities and regional preferences. Martha and Daniel Turnbull subscribed to the Horticulturist, published by nurseryman and theorist A. J. Downing’s publications beginning in the 1840s. Yet as Turner notes, the phrase “pleasure grounds” does not appear in Martha’s garden diary until 1872, twenty years after Downing’s death, and several of Martha’s planting and maintenance decisions disregard Downing’s guidelines for producing picturesque landscapes.[25] A moss house that an enslaved man named Jim built in January of 1849 (view text), could equally have been inspired by one of Downing’s publications, or by the local landscape gardener Samuel Richardson, who mentioned such features by name in newspaper advertisements that appeared the same month (view text).
Martha Turnbull continued to maintain the gardens following the death of Daniel Turnbull in 1861, the American Civil War, and the emancipation of her enslaved workforce. While some formerly enslaved gardeners, particularly Ben and Augustus, are also mentioned in entries dated after the war in 1865, the emergence of a sharecropping economy at Rosedown was reflected by a new group of paid laborers who appear in the garden diary (view text). As a consequence of the economic hardship that the plantation faced, entries written after 1867 demonstrate a new and systematic emphasis on garden-related expenses.[26] Following Martha’s death in 1896, the gardens survived largely unaltered, if somewhat neglected, until the property was acquired by Catherine Fondren Underwood in 1956. Underwood sponsored a restoration of the gardens overseen by Ralph Ellis Gunn, but she demolished the remains of slave quarters north of the gardens in which many of Martha’s gardeners would have resided.[27] Gunn’s restoration has been praised for its historical accuracy, although it altered the planting and design with the addition of several fountains, one built on foundations that originally supported a greenhouse.[28] In 2000, the State of Louisiana purchased Rosedown, which it operates it as a State Historic Site.
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, (plantation cabbages), view on Zotero.
- ↑ Turnbull 2012, 217, (graveyard), view on Zotero.
- ↑ 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.
- ↑ Turnbull 2012, 92 ("avenue"), 106 ("partarre"), view on Zotero.
- ↑ Turnbull 2012, 109 (pineapple), view on Zotero.
- ↑ Turnbull 2012, 124, view on Zotero; Fricker and Turner 2005, 18, view on Zotero. Two later summer houses of uncertain date were placed in the north and south gardens on either side of the oak-lined avenue. Fricker and Turner, 18 (dated to before 1861), view on Zotero; Richard Koch, “Rosedown Plantation, St. Francisville, West Feliciana Parish, Louisiana,” Historic American Buildings Survey (New Orleans, LA, June 1958), 2 (dated to 1895), https://www.loc.gov/item/la0045/.
- ↑ The church was moved relocated farther from the main house of the plantation in the mid-twentieth century. Thomas J. Durant, Jr., “The Enduring Legacy of an African-American Plantation Church,” The Journal of Negro History 80, no. 2 (Spring 1995): 81–95, view on Zotero.
- ↑ Anderson 2004, “Comparing Alternative Landscapes,” 127 (location), 161-162 (dateable ceramics), view on Zotero.
- ↑ Turnbull 2012, 8, view on Zotero.
- ↑ Turnbull 2012, 112, (Leuchars), view on Zotero.
- ↑ The wallpaper has been replaced at least twice, and the original subject matter of the panorama is unknown. Ola Mae Word, Reflections of Rosedown (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979), 11, view on Zotero.
- ↑ Turnbull 2012, 22, view on Zotero.
- ↑ Turnbull 2012, 86; Ola Mae Word 1979, Reflections of Rosedown (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979), 25. For Leopold (or Leopoldo) Pisani see Giuseppe Formigli, ed., Guida per la città di Firenze e suoi contorni (Firenze: Presso i F. Carini e Giuseppe Formigli, 1849), 258, view on Zotero.
- ↑ The marble sculptures, several of which were photographed in the Carnegie Survey of the Architecture of the South, were removed by Gene Raymond Slivka. Cast-iron garden decorations from Rosedown appeared at Cakebread Auction (April 25–26, 2015).
- ↑ Turnbull 2012, 125, view on Zotero.
- ↑ Turnbull 2012, 56, view on Zotero.
- ↑ Turnbull 2012, 183, view on Zotero.
- ↑ Anderson 2004, 225-227 (1858), 57-63 (1862), view on Zotero. Jane may in fact have been recaptured after fleeing enslavement in 1849, although it is not clear if the escaped woman is the same individual mentioned by Martha Turnbull.
- ↑ Fricker and Turner 2005, 30, view on Zotero.
- ↑ Thomas Affleck, Affleck’s Southern Rural Almanac, and Plantation and Garden Calendar, for 1851 (New Orleans: Office of the “Picayune,” 1850), 8, view on Zotero. Via Turnbull 2012, 102, view on Zotero.
- ↑ Turnbull 2012, 21 (Buist and Prince), 114 (Makenzie), 127 (Hebron), view on Zotero.
- ↑ Turnbull 2012, 41 (Judge Thomas Butler), 89 (Mrs. Mathews and Mr. Fort), view on Zotero. For more about the gardens of Thomas Butler at his plantation, the Cottage, see Suzanne Louise Turner, “Plantation Papers as a Source for Landscape Documentation and Interpretation: The Thomas Butler Papers,” Bulletin of the Association for Preservation Technology 12, no. 3 (1980): 28–45, view on Zotero.
- ↑ Turnbull 2012, 75 (trimming trees), 110-111 (lombardy poplars), 216 (pleasure ground), view on Zotero.
- ↑ Turnbull 2012, 171, view on Zotero.
- ↑ Anderson 2004, 143, view on Zotero.
- ↑ Fricker and Turner 2005, 9, 19–20 view on Zotero.
