Magnolia Grove: A Comparative Study of Plantation Landscape and Architecture

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Magnolia Grove is a nineteenth-century town house property in Greensboro, Alabama. It functioned as a largely self-sufficient farming operation with around 25 acres of land and multiple slaves living and working on site. Because of these features, Magnolia Grove was used as a case study in comparison with other plantation landscapes. In short, this project is a comparative, regional study that looks at the built landscape through the comparison of possible landscape patterns of plantations concentrated within the Deep South, particularly Alabama. Through the analysis of Magnolia Grove’s built landscape, associated artifacts, and features such as swept yards, previously established regional artifact patterns were used to compare contemporary components at Magnolia Grove. This project argues that plantation landscapes were formed through a variety and synthesis of processes such as environmental and individual autonomy of both slave and master to form a unique plantation that is at once similar to other regions, but also different due to various factors that rely upon the individual population at that plantation.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 26166