Virginia Plantations

Virginia's historic plantations are one of America's great cultural treasures.

Not only do they tell us much about domestic life and agrarian economy in our country's formative years, but they give us a glimpse of the environment into which many of our greatest leaders were born, the environment that nourished them materially, intellectually, and spiritually.

The plantations, particularly the houses and their landscaped settings, also constitute a great artistic heritage.

Some of Virginia's plantation dwellings represent the highest level of America's architectural achievement in the colonial, Federal, and antebellum periods.

The houses illustrate the most exacting standards in design, craftsmanship, and materials, and their settings show the attention given to garden layout.

The term plantation is used loosely not only in Virginia but throughout the South.

 In its historical sense, a plantation was an agricultural unit of hundreds, and in some cases thousands, of acres on which one or more cash crops were grown.

The crops required tending and harvesting by a large labor force, which before emancipation was provided by slaves.

A plantation was distinct from a family farm; in its strictest sense the latter was a much smaller unit producing a broad range of foods and other agricultural products to meet the direct needs of the owning family, whose members provided the labor.

The owner of a plantation was called a planter but did no planting or manual labor. He served as the chief executive officer of what was for its time a complex form of agribusiness.

 In Virginia, applying the term plantation to a property's name is primarily a modern practice.

 A place was called merely Westover, for example, not Westover plantation.

A small plantation, particularly during the early colonial period, was most often called by the name of the owning family, such as Thoroughgood's.

Also, except in rare instances, only the land was named, not the house. Indeed, a majority of plantation names allude to sonic physical characteristic of the land: Berry Hill, Belle Grove, Poplar Forest, and the like.

 Many other names honored places in the British Isles from which the settlers or their ancestors came: Brandon, Brompton, and Wilton.

The establishment of the Virginia plantation system came on the heels of John Rolfe's successful cultivation of tobacco in 1614.

Tobacco provided the fledgling colony's first marketable cash crop, and a highly popular one at that.

 England's craving for tobacco placed immediate demand for production on the colonists, who prior to that time were mainly coping with survival.

Meeting the demand required labor, which was supplied by more colonists and, very soon, slaves.

The year 1619 saw the first importation of African laborers, who came initially as indentured servants and later as slaves. Before long nearly all of the colony's efforts were geared to tobacco growing and the tobacco trade. With the tremendous popularity of the snuffs and smoking materials made from the pungent weed, prosperity came quickly.

Some of Virginia's plantations, especially those in the immediate vicinity of Jamestown Island, such as Chippokes and Brandon, are among the oldest identifiable agricultural units in the country, having been farmed for over 350 years.

 As with any frontier society, priorities among the settlers did not include artistic achievement but were focused on taming the wilderness and then making one's fortune.

Many of the earliest settlers became very prosperous but did not express their wealth in elegant architectural surroundings Prosperity throughout most of the first century of settlement was counted in the number of acres and slaves one owned, not in the size or beauty of one's house.

Hence the earliest plantation houses were generally rather rude affairs: clapboard-cladded structures supported on wooden posts driven directly into the ground.

As such, they were temporary buildings, and thus none of this earliest form of housing, employed consistently throughout the seventeenth century, has survived.

 The few brick houses of the first century or so of settlement, such as Bacon's Castle, the Adam Thoroughgood House, and the Lynnhaven House, give a false impression of the typical housing of the period.

These brick structures were uncommonly well built, and have therefore lasted while the scores of their post-framed neighbors have all rotted, burned, or been replaced with more substantial structures.

Such architectural pursuits were probably inspired by the construction of the Governor's Palace in Williamsburg in the first decade of the eighteenth century.

The palace represented Virginia's first truly elegant, architecturally up-to-date residence. It gave the leaders of colonial society something to emulate.

The completion of the palace coincided with the beginning of the age of the great plantations.

Unlike the seventeenth century in Virginia, which was marked by small settlements and relatively small plantations, the early eighteenth century was characterized by the development of huge establishments such as the Lee family's Stratford and the Page's Rosewell, vast manors worked by scores of slaves.

These large plantations were essentially self-sufficient communities trading directly with the mother country.

This direct trade inhibited the development of towns and cities.

Thus, except for Williamsburg, colonial Virginia had practically no towns, and nothing resembling a city such as Philadelphia or Boston.

Plantations were isolated along the great tidal rivers that provided transportation arteries and the harbors necessary for direct trade with England.

Probably Virginia's first really great plantation house was that at Corotoman, home of Robert Carter, who owned so much land and held so much political and economic power that he was referred to as "King" Carter.

Corotoman was destroyed early by fire, but many of Carter's relatives followed his example by erecting houses that the English gentry would not find uncomfortable or inelegant.

Surviving Carter family homes include Shirley, Sabine Hall, and Carter's Grove. "King" Carter's descendants married into practically every important colonial family, and the taste for fine houses multiplied.

 Thus, in the eighteenth century, leading families such as the Beverleys, Burwells, Byrds, Harrisons, Lees, Randolphs, and Tayloes, whose various members were related many times over, all developed impressive family seats on their sprawling estates.

They knew one another's homes well and frequently shared designers and artisans.

Impressive though they may seem to us today, Virginia plantation houses like Shirley and Berkeley contain less than a dozen principal rooms.

Unlike those in English country houses, the service areas in a Virginia plantation dwelling were in separate buildings, not under the roof of the main house.

Some service areas were in architecturally related flanking structures called dependencies.

In a few of the more elaborate houses, dependencies were linked to the main house by passageways called hyphens.

Hyphens sometimes continued to be used in the Federal period, as at Woodlawn. Original hyphens are employed at Mount Airy, Brandon, and Chatham; not infrequently, however, the passageways are twentieth-century additions, as at Carter's Grove and Westover.

 In contrast to dependencies, the more utilitarian service structures were referred to simply as outbuildings. Important colonial houses could require as many as ten to fifteen outbuildings for domestic support, including a kitchen, a laundry, smokehouses, a dairy, a weaving house, a schoolhouse, an office, and privies.

If all the rooms of such a complex were gathered under one roof, the result would be a house of thirty or forty rooms.

Thus the domestic core of a colonial plantation was more of a village than a single impressive mansion.

House servants normally lived in the dependencies or outbuildings, rarely in the main house Field hands lived in rows of slave quarters usually far from the main dwelling.

Because few plantations today retain anywhere near their original number of outbuildings, it is difficult to conjure up an image of the sprawl or complexity of a plantation's core.

A notable exception is Mount Vernon, the village-like quality of which is appreciated in an aerial view.

While most plantations have suffered the loss of a majority of their outbuildings, the loss of farm structures has been even more acute.

 Plantations required barns, cribs, sheds, stables, blacksmith's shops, slave quarters, and frequently mills, wharves, and warehouses.

Except for Bremo, which preserves a large grouping of uncommonly well-built if not architecturally distinguished farm buildings, practically no Virginia plantation preserves any notable collection of original farm structures. Ironically, slave quarters, the support structures most often associated with the southern plantation, arc now almost extinct in Virginia.

The atypically well-built brick slave houses at Bien Venue are among the last remaining handful of known slave quarters in the entire state.

Nearly all of Virginia's plantation houses, even its most sophisticated ones, arc conservative architecturally, usually simplified but not necessarily unrefined adaptations of the English Georgian style.

Only the architecture of Thomas Jefferson can be said to be truly innovative.

Jefferson, both in his own home, Monticello and the houses he designed for his friends, as well as in his buildings for the University of Virginia, tried to give Virginians more interesting models of architectural taste, drawing inspiration from Classical orders, Palladian villas, and French pavilions.

 A few houses, such as those at Bremo, Estouteville, and Edgemont, were inspired by Jeffersonian examples, but the owners of most Virginia plantations, both before and after Independence, continued to adhere to straightforward Georgian forms.

With the loss of fertility of the land through years of tobacco planting, Virginia's Tidewater plantations went into a decline following the American Revolution.

 A new generation of the planter families thus moved to landholdings in northern and western Virginia, and it is there that one finds the best examples of plantation houses of the Federal and antebellum periods.

The beautiful rolling landscape of northern Virginia offered scenic settings for such stately Federal plantation houses as Farley, Oatlands, and Woodlawn.

Likewise, the fertile lower Shenandoah Valley saw the construction of the kindred dwellings Carter Hall, Belle Grove, and the Tuleyries.

Although such houses might not be considered architectural breakthroughs, they have a patrician beauty rarely equaled in American domestic design.

Unlike the Deep South, Virginia saw no great wave of plantation house construction in the antebellum period. Virginia, being an old state, possessed an ample stock of plantation homes by the 1830s and 1840s.

This fact, coupled with the wearing out of the Tidewater lands and a general agricultural depression, suppressed demand for impressive new plantation dwellings.

Virginia thus has a short supply of great-columned Greek revival mansions, much less ones in the more exotic Gothic and Italianate styles.

The Bruce family on their vast grain-producing plantations in Southside Virginia provided a notable exception.

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Toby Beavers

Virginia Realtor

877-855-7913

Email us here your questions about any Virginia plantations