The Sunnyside Plantation was a former cotton plantation and is a historic site, located near Lake Village in Chicot County , Arkansas , in the Arkansas Delta region.
121-542: Built as a cotton plantation in the Antebellum South , it was farmed using the forced labor of enslaved African Americans. After the American Civil War in 1865, freedmen farmed it. From the 1890s to the 1910s, the plantation used convict laborers and employed immigrants from Northern Italy , many of whom were subject to peonage . They were later replaced by Black sharecroppers . The plantation
242-416: A butter churn . Once firm enough to separate out, but soft enough to stick together, the butter was taken out of the churn, washed in very cold water, and salted. The churning process also produced buttermilk as a by-product. It was the remaining liquid after the butter was removed from the churn. All of the products of this process would have been stored in the spring house or ice house . The smokehouse
363-406: A courtyard to the rear of the main house known as the kitchen yard. They included a cookhouse (separate kitchen building), pantry , washhouse ( laundry ), smokehouse , chicken house , spring house or ice house , milkhouse ( dairy ), covered well , and cistern . The privies would have been located some distance away from the plantation house and kitchen yard. The cookhouse or kitchen
484-405: A patent of his cotton gin on October 28, 1793; the patent was granted on March 14, 1794, but was not validated until 1807. Whitney's patent was assigned patent number 72X. There is slight controversy over whether the idea of the modern cotton gin and its constituent elements are correctly attributed to Eli Whitney. The popular image of Whitney inventing the cotton gin is attributed to an article on
605-451: A primer , and a hornbook . As the children grew older their schooling began to prepare them for their adult roles on the plantation. Boys studied academic subjects, proper social etiquette , and plantation management, while girls learned art , music , French , and the domestic skills suited to the mistress of a plantation. Most plantation owners maintained an office for keeping records, transacting business, writing correspondence, and
726-556: A vacuum pan , where it was boiled until the sugar in the syrup was crystallized. The crystallized sugar was then cooled and separated from any remaining molasses in a process known as purging. The final step was packing the sugar into hogshead barrels for transport to market. Cotton plantations, the most common type of plantation in the South prior to the Civil War, were the last type of plantation to fully develop. Cotton production
847-635: A building raised roughly a story off of the ground on posts, was used to separate the lighter chaff and dust from the rice. Sugar plantations were most commonly found in Louisiana. In fact, Louisiana produced almost all of the sugar grown in the United States during the prewar period. From one-quarter to one-half of all sugar consumed in the United States came from Louisiana sugar plantations. Plantations grew sugarcane from Louisiana's colonial era onward, but large scale production did not begin until
968-527: A corrugated wash board until clean. By the 1850s, they would have been passed through a mangle . Prior to that time, wringing out the items was done by hand. The items would then be ready to be hung out to dry or, in inclement weather, placed on a drying rack . Ironing would have been done with a metal flat iron , often heated in the fireplace, and various other devices. The milkhouse would have been used by enslaved people to make milk into cream , butter , and buttermilk . The process started with separating
1089-452: A flat surface of still lower land, with a silver thread of water curling through it, extended, Holland-like, to the horizon. Usually at as great a distance as a quarter of a mile from the road, and from a half mile to a mile apart, were the residences of the planters – large white houses, with groves of evergreen trees about them; and between these and the road were little villages of slave-cabins ... The cottages were framed buildings, boarded on
1210-684: A lot of money from their labor. Albert Bushnell Hart , a professor of history at Harvard University , agreed with Percy. Congressman Benjamin G. Humphreys II agreed with them and argued that immigrants could pay off their debts by selling their cotton. limited economic opportunities in Northern Italy caused not much to be done to support Quackenbos's views. Prosecution was stopped in its tracks, possibly because of Percy's friendship with US President Theodore Roosevelt with whom he had hunted bears on his Smedes Plantation , in Mississippi. Over
1331-429: A modified Forbes version, one man and a boy could produce 250 pounds per day. If oxen were used to power 16 of these machines, and a few people's labor was used to feed them, they could produce as much work as 750 people did formerly. The Indian roller cotton gin, known as the churka or charkha , was introduced to the United States in the mid-18th century, when it was adopted in the southern United States . The device
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#17327977383161452-548: A more accurate image of what life was like for slaves and slave owners", The Washington Post wrote in 2019. Hannah Knowles in The Washington Post wrote, "The changes have begun to draw people long alienated by the sites' whitewashing of the past and to satisfy what staff call a hunger for real history, as plantations add slavery-focused tours, rebuild cabins and reconstruct the lives of the enslaved with help from their descendants." However, some white visitors to
1573-460: A place for the hired tutor or governess to educate the planter's children, and sometimes even those of other planters in the area. On most plantations, however, a room in the main house was sufficient for schooling, rather than a separate dedicated building. Paper was precious, so the children often recited their lessons until they memorized them. The usual texts in the beginning were the Bible ,
1694-497: A plantation from a farm . Typically, the focus of a farm was subsistence agriculture . In contrast, the primary focus of a plantation was the production of cash crops , with enough staple food crops produced to feed the population of the estate and the livestock. A common definition of what constituted a plantation is that it typically had 500 to 1,000 acres (2.0 to 4.0 km ) or more of land and produced one or two cash crops for sale. Other scholars have attempted to define it by
1815-477: A prominent planter from Greenville, Mississippi, suggested that European peasants were more industrious than Blacks. However, the businessmen were accused of " peonage ." In 1907, after hearing many complaints from immigrants, Edmondo Mayor des Planches , the Italian ambassador to the United States, visited the plantation. As he explained in his 1913 report, Attraverso gli Stati Uniti per L'Emigrazione Italiana , he
1936-418: A result, the region became even more dependent on plantations that used black slave labor, with plantation agriculture becoming the largest sector of its economy. While it took a single laborer about ten hours to separate a single pound of fiber from the seeds, a team of two or three slaves using a cotton gin could produce around fifty pounds of cotton in just one day. The number of slaves rose in concert with
2057-475: A single roller made of iron or wood and a flat piece of stone or wood. The earliest evidence of the cotton gin is found in the fifth century, in the form of Buddhist paintings depicting a single-roller gin in the Ajanta Caves in western India . These early gins were difficult to use and required a great deal of skill. A narrow single roller was necessary to expel the seeds from the cotton without crushing
2178-404: A small scale. Whitney's gin is made with two rotating cylinders. The first cylinder has lines of teeth around the circumference, and angled against this cylinder is a metal plate with small holes, "ginning ribs", through which the teeth can fit with minimal gaps. The teeth grip the cotton fibers as the mechanism rotates, dragging them through these small holes. The seeds are too big to fit through
2299-486: A state of the United States of America. In 1840, the plantation was acquired by Elisha Worthington for US$ 60,000. Worthington also agreed to give 250 bales of cotton to Johnson annually for the next ten years. Alongside the land and several buildings, Worthington purchased 42 of Johnson's slaves in the transaction. He built a dock on the Mississippi River to facilitate the transportation of cotton. During
2420-408: A strainer to be collected into a tank. From there the juice went through a process that removed impurities from the liquid and thickened it through evaporation. It was steam-heated in vats where additional impurities were removed by adding lime to the syrup and then the mixture was strained. At this point the liquid had been transformed into molasses . It was then placed into a closed vessel known as
2541-421: A system gin, and obtained related patents. The Munger System Ginning Outfit (or system gin) integrated all the ginning operation machinery, thus assuring the cotton would flow through the machines smoothly. Such system gins use air to move cotton from machine to machine. Munger's motivation for his inventions included improving employee working conditions in the gin. However, the selling point for most gin owners
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#17327977383162662-444: A telephone line to Greenville, Mississippi , the county seat of nearby Washington County, Mississippi , home to the cotton industry. However, most freedmen refused to work for Corbin, because he was not a Southerner but a carpetbagger . In 1894, Corbin entered into an agreement with the state of Arkansas to use convict laborers . He was given 250 convicts, who picked cotton on the plantation. The profits were split between Corbin and
2783-550: A visit to plantations along the Georgia coast in 1855: In the afternoon, I left the main road, and, towards night, reached a much more cultivated district. The forest of pines extended uninterruptedly on one side of the way, but on the other was a continued succession of very large fields, or rich dark soil – evidently reclaimed swamp-land – which had been cultivated the previous year, in Sea Island cotton, or maize. Beyond them,
2904-558: The American Civil War of 1861–1865, the plantation was badly damaged by Union Army forces. Worthington moved his slaves and livestock to Texas from 1862 to 1865, and let his two mulatto children, including his son James W. Mason , take care of the land. On June 5, 1864, Union forces invaded the plantation to disrupt landings on the Mississippi River by the Confederate States Army . Meanwhile, on June 5–6,
3025-478: The American Civil War . The mild temperate climate , plentiful rainfall, and fertile soils of the Southeastern United States allowed the flourishing of large plantations, where large numbers of enslaved Africans were held captive and forced to produce crops to create wealth for a white elite . Today, as was also true in the past, there is a wide range of opinion as to what differentiated
3146-576: The Battle of Old River Lake , also known as the Battle of Ditch Bayou, took place not far from the plantation. By 1865, it had been declared "abandoned land" by the Freedmen's Bureau . Even though Worthington was pardoned by President Andrew Johnson , he decided to sell his plantation, partly due to the loss of his workforce, the dwindling price of cotton, and his worsening health. In 1866, Worthington sold
3267-555: The Episcopal denomination. Early records indicate that at Faunsdale Plantation the mistress of the estate, Louisa Harrison, gave regular instruction to her slaves by reading the services of the church and teaching the Episcopal catechism to their children. Following the death of her first husband, she had a large Carpenter Gothic church built, St. Michael's Church. She latter remarried to Rev. William A. Stickney, who served as
3388-483: The Indian subcontinent since at earliest AD 500 and then in other regions. The Indian worm-gear roller gin was invented sometime around the 16th century and has, according to Lakwete, remained virtually unchanged up to the present time. A modern mechanical cotton gin was created by American inventor Eli Whitney in 1793 and patented in 1794. Whitney's gin used a combination of a wire screen and small wire hooks to pull
3509-558: The South Carolina Lowcountry . Until the 19th century, rice was threshed from the stalks and the husk was pounded from the grain by hand, a very labor-intensive endeavor. Steam-powered rice pounding mills had become common by the 1830s. They were used to thresh the grain from the inedible chaff . A separate chimney, required for the fires powering the steam engine, was adjacent to the pounding mill and often connected by an underground system. The winnowing barn ,
3630-560: The Southern United States from the 17th into the 20th century. The complex included everything from the main residence down to the pens for livestock . Until the abolition of slavery , such plantations were generally self-sufficient settlements that relied on the forced labor of enslaved people. Plantations are an important aspect of the history of the Southern United States , particularly before
3751-491: The crank handle in the cotton gin, first appeared sometime during the late Delhi Sultanate or the early Mughal Empire. The incorporation of the worm gear and crank handle into the roller cotton gin led to greatly expanded Indian cotton textile production during the Mughal era. It was reported that, with an Indian cotton gin, which is half machine and half tool, one man and one woman could clean 28 pounds of cotton per day. With
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3872-537: The "great house" and extended family. Novels, often adapted into films , presented a romantic , sanitized view of plantation life and ignored or glorified white supremacy . The most popular of these were The Birth of a Nation (1916), based on Thomas Dixon Jr. ,'s best-selling novel The Clansman (1905), and Gone with the Wind (1939), based on the best-selling novel of the same name (1936) by Margaret Mitchell . On larger plantations an overseer represented
3993-533: The 16th century. This mechanical device was, in some areas, driven by waterpower. The worm gear roller gin, which was invented in the Indian subcontinent during the early Delhi Sultanate era of the 13th to 14th centuries, came into use in the Mughal Empire sometime around the 16th century, and is still used in the Indian subcontinent through to the present day. Another innovation, the incorporation of
4114-401: The 1810s and 1820s. A successful sugar plantation required a skilled retinue of hired labor and enslaved people. The most specialized structure on a sugar plantation was the sugar mill (sugar house), where, by the 1830s, the steam-powered mill crushed the sugarcane stalks between rollers. This squeezed the juice from the stalks and the cane juice would run out the bottom of the mill through
4235-482: The American Civil War. In modern cotton production, cotton arrives at industrial cotton gins either in trailers, in compressed rectangular " modules " weighing up to 10 metric tons each or in polyethylene wrapped round modules similar to a bale of hay produced during the picking process by the most recent generation of cotton pickers. Trailer cotton (i.e. cotton not compressed into modules) arriving at
4356-790: The Calhoun Land Company, and attempted to bring former slaves back to their old plantations. John C. Calhoun II testified before the United States Senate Committee on Education and Labor in September 1883, explaining that his goal was to empower freedmen to save and become self-sufficient tenants. The testimony was so well-received that it was published by civil rights leader Timothy Thomas Fortune in his 1884 Black and White: Land, Labor, and Politics . In reality, while some freedmen managed to become tenants, other were sharecroppers, or even wage laborers. By
4477-690: The Civil War: Struggles for the Meaning of Freedom , suggests that the minimum requirement for planter status was twenty people enslaved, especially since a Southern planter could exempt Confederate duty for one white male per twenty people owned. In his study of Black Belt counties in Alabama, Jonathan Weiner defines planters by ownership of real property, rather than of slaves. A planter, for Weiner, owned at least $ 10,000 worth of real estate in 1850 and $ 32,000 worth in 1860, equivalent to about
4598-634: The Episcopal minister of St. Michael's and was later appointed by Bishop Richard Wilmer as a "Missionary to the Negroes," after which Louisa joined him as an unofficial fellow minister among the African Americans of the Black Belt . Most plantation churches were of wood-frame construction, although some were built in brick, often stuccoed . Early examples tended towards the vernacular or neoclassicism, but later examples were almost always in
4719-927: The Gothic Revival style. A few rivaled those built by southern town congregations. Two of the most elaborate extant examples in the Deep South are the Chapel of the Cross at Annandale Plantation and St. Mary's Chapel at Laurel Hill Plantation , both Episcopalian structures in Mississippi. In both cases the original plantation houses have been destroyed, but the quality and design of the churches can give some insight into how elaborate some plantation complexes and their buildings could be. St. Mary Chapel, in Natchez, dates to 1839, built in stuccoed brick with large Gothic and Tudor arch windows, hood mouldings over
4840-481: The South. Additionally, the greatly expanded supply of cotton created strong demand for textile machinery and improved machine designs that replaced wooden parts with metal. This led to the invention of many machine tools in the early 19th century. The invention of the cotton gin caused massive growth in the production of cotton in the United States, concentrated mostly in the South. Cotton production expanded from 750,000 bales in 1830 to 2.85 million bales in 1850. As
4961-618: The bale was secured with twine. An individual who owned a plantation was known as a planter . Historians of the prewar South have generally defined "planter" most precisely as a person owning property (real estate) and keeping 20 or more people enslaved . In the " Black Belt " counties of Alabama and Mississippi , the terms "planter" and "farmer" were often synonymous. The historians Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman define large planters as those who enslaved over 50 people, and medium planters as those who enslaved between 16 and 50 people. Historian David Williams, in A People's History of
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5082-450: The centuries. With the collapse of the plantation economy and subsequent Southern transition from a largely agrarian to an industrial society , plantations and their building complexes became obsolete. Although the majority have been destroyed, the most common structures to have survived are the plantation houses . As is true of buildings in general, the more substantially built and architecturally interesting buildings have tended to be
5203-527: The cleaning of seeds from short-staple cotton, it damaged the fibers of extra-long staple cotton ( Gossypium barbadense ). In 1840 Fones McCarthy received a patent for a "Smooth Cylinder Cotton-gin", a roller gin. McCarthy's gin was marketed for use with both short-staple and extra-long staple cotton but was particularly useful for processing long-staple cotton. After McCarthy's patent expired in 1861, McCarthy type gins were manufactured in Britain and sold around
5324-417: The cookhouse or a storehouse and would have secured items such as barrels of salt , sugar , flour , cornmeal and the like. The washhouse is where clothes, tablecloths, and bed-covers were cleaned and ironed. It also sometimes had living quarters for the laundrywoman . Cleaning laundry in this period was labor-intensive for the domestic slaves that performed it. It required various gadgets to accomplish
5445-444: The cotton gin by 1796. However, the evidence indicates Whitney did invent the saw gin, for which he is famous. Although he spent many years in court attempting to enforce his patent against planters who made unauthorized copies, a change in patent law ultimately made his claim legally enforceable – too late for him to make much money from the device in the single year remaining before the patent expired. While Whitney's gin facilitated
5566-458: The cotton gin led to an increase in the use of slaves on Southern plantations. Because of that inadvertent effect on American slavery, which ensured that the South's economy developed in the direction of plantation-based agriculture (while encouraging the growth of the textile industry elsewhere, such as in the North), the invention of the cotton gin is frequently cited as one of the indirect causes of
5687-569: The cotton is held by rapidly rotating saw cylinders. The gin stand uses the teeth of rotating saws to pull the cotton through a series of "ginning ribs", which pull the fibers from the seeds which are too large to pass through the ribs. The cleaned seed is then removed from the gin via an auger conveyor system. The seed is reused for planting or is sent to an oil mill to be further processed into cottonseed oil and cottonseed meal . The lint cleaners again use saws and grid bars, this time to separate immature seeds and any remaining foreign matter from
5808-479: The cotton through, while brushes continuously removed the loose cotton lint to prevent jams. It revolutionized the cotton industry in the United States, but also inadvertently led to the growth of slavery in the American South . Whitney's gin made cotton farming more profitable and efficient so plantation owners expanded their plantations and used more of their slaves to pick cotton. Whitney never invented
5929-463: The crop. Tobacco plantations were most common in certain parts of Georgia, Kentucky, Missouri, North Carolina, Tennessee, South Carolina, and Virginia. The first agricultural plantations in Virginia were founded on the growing of tobacco. Tobacco production on plantations was very labor-intensive. It required the entire year to gather seeds, start them growing in cold frames , and then transplant
6050-478: The culmination of what geographer Charles S. Aiken has termed the second ginning revolution, in which the privately owned plantation gins were replaced by large-scale public ginneries. This revolution, in turn, led to a major restructuring of the cotton gin industry, as the small, scattered gin factories and shops of the nineteenth century gave way to a dwindling number of large twentieth-century corporations designing and constructing entire ginning operations." One of
6171-573: The doors and windows, buttresses , a crenelated roof-line, and a small Gothic spire crowning the whole. Although construction records are very sketchy, the Chapel of the Cross, built from 1850 to 1852 near Madison, may be attributable to Frank Wills or Richard Upjohn , both of whom designed almost identical churches in the North during the same time period that the Chapel of the Cross was built. Another secondary structure on many plantations during
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#17327977383166292-668: The experiences of Bush's grandmother, who worked on the Sunnyside Plantation as a child. By the 1910s, the Italian laborers were replaced by Black sharecroppers. In 1920, the plantation was acquired by W.H. and J.C. Baird. Four years later, it was acquired by the Kansas City Life Insurance Company at an auction. In 1935, they leased it to the Arkansas Rural Rehabilitation Corporation. The plantation
6413-603: The few (and perhaps only) examples of a Munger gin left in existence is on display at Frogmore Plantation in Louisiana. Prior to the introduction of the mechanical cotton gin, cotton had required considerable labor to clean and separate the fibers from the seeds. With Eli Whitney's gin, cotton became a tremendously profitable business, creating many fortunes in the Antebellum South . Cities such as New Orleans, Louisiana ; Mobile, Alabama ; Charleston, South Carolina ; and Galveston, Texas became major shipping ports, deriving substantial economic benefit from cotton raised throughout
6534-425: The fibers ("lint") in the bolls are tightly interwoven with seeds. To make the fibers usable, the seeds and fibers must first be separated, a task which had been previously performed manually, with production of cotton requiring hours of labor for the separation. Many simple seed-removing devices had been invented, but until the innovation of the cotton gin, most required significant operator attention and worked only on
6655-464: The fibers. The bale press then compresses the cotton into bales for storage and shipping. Modern gins can process up to 15 tonnes (33,000 lb) of cotton per hour. A single-roller cotton gin came into use in India by the 5th century. An improvement invented in India was the two-roller gin, known as the "churka", "charki", or "wooden-worm-worked roller". The earliest versions of the cotton gin consisted of
6776-429: The fibers. The bale press then compresses the cotton into bales for storage and shipping. Modern gins can process up to 15 tonnes (33,000 lb) of cotton per hour. Modern cotton gins create a substantial amount of cotton gin residue (CGR) consisting of sticks, leaves, dirt, immature bolls, and cottonseed. Research is currently under way to investigate the use of this waste in producing ethanol . Due to fluctuations in
6897-428: The fields. A few enslavers went further in providing housing for the household servants. When Waldwic in Alabama was remodeled in the Gothic Revival style in the 1852, the enslaved people serving the household were provided with larger accommodations that matched the architecture of the main house. This model, however, was exceedingly rare. Famous landscape designer Frederick Law Olmsted had this recollection of
7018-403: The financial panics of 1819 and 1837, when demand by British mills for cotton dropped, many small planters went bankrupt and their land and slaves were bought by larger plantations. As cotton-producing estates grew in size, so did the number of slaveholders and the average number of enslaved people held. A cotton plantation normally had a cotton gin house, where the cotton gin was used to remove
7139-719: The food staples and equipment that they relied on for their existence. This type of debt bondage , for blacks and poor whites, led to a populist movement in the late 19th century that began to bring blacks and whites together for a common cause. This early populist movement is largely credited with helping to cause state governments in the South, mostly controlled by the planter elite, to enact various laws that disenfranchised poor whites and blacks, through grandfather clauses , literacy tests , poll taxes , and various other laws. The agricultural structures on plantations had some basic structures in common and others that varied widely. They depended on what crops and animals were raised on
7260-427: The form of monumental towers set near the main house. The pigeons were raised to be eaten as a delicacy and their droppings were used as fertilizer. Few functions could take place on a plantation without a reliable water supply. Every plantation had at least one, and sometimes several, wells . These were usually roofed and often partially enclosed by latticework to exclude animals. Since the well water in many areas
7381-503: The former Hermitage Plantation in Georgia and Boone Hall in South Carolina, even those who worked in the fields were provided with brick cabins. More fortunate in their accommodations were those who served in the enslavers' houses or were skilled laborers. They usually resided either in a part of the main house or in their own houses, which were normally more comfortable dwellings than those of their counterparts who worked in
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#17327977383167502-438: The gin is sucked in via a pipe, approximately 16 inches (41 cm) in diameter, that is swung over the cotton. This pipe is usually manually operated but is increasingly automated in modern cotton plants. The need for trailers to haul the product to the gin has been drastically reduced since the introduction of modules. If the cotton is shipped in modules, the module feeder breaks the modules apart using spiked rollers and extracts
7623-475: The gin stand ran smoothly, a condenser to make the clean cotton coming out of the gin easier to handle, and indoor presses so that cotton no longer had to be carried across the gin yard to be baled. Then, in 1879, while he was running his father's gin in Rutersville, Texas , Robert S. Munger invented additional system ginning techniques. Robert and his wife, Mary Collett, later moved to Mexia, Texas , built
7744-455: The height of the sharecropping -era was the plantation store or commissary. Although some prewar plantations had a commissary that distributed food and supplies to enslaved people, the plantation store was essentially a postwar addition to the plantation complex. In addition to the share of their crop already owed to the plantation owner for the use of his or her land, tenants and sharecroppers purchased, usually on credit against their next crop,
7865-575: The holes, and are thus removed from the rotating cotton by the metal plate, before they fall into a collecting pot. On the other side of the first cylinder, there is a second cylinder, also rotating, with brushes attached. This second cylinder wipes the cotton from the first, and deposits it into the collecting bucket. The seed is reused for planting or is sent to an oil mill to be further processed into cottonseed oil and cottonseed meal . The lint cleaners again use saws and grid bars, this time to separate immature seeds and any remaining foreign matter from
7986-503: The increase in cotton production, increasing from around 700,000 in 1790 to around 3.2 million in 1850. The invention of the cotton gin led to increased demands for slave labor in the American South , reversing the economic decline that had occurred in the region during the late 18th century. The cotton gin thus "transformed cotton as a crop and the American South into the globe's first agricultural powerhouse". The invention of
8107-525: The largest pieces of foreign material from the cotton. The module feeder's loose cotton is then sucked into the same starting point as the trailer cotton. The cotton then enters a dryer, which removes excess moisture. The cylinder cleaner uses six or seven rotating, spiked cylinders to break up large clumps of cotton. Finer foreign material, such as soil and leaves, passes through rods or screens for removal. The stick machine uses centrifugal force to remove larger foreign matter, such as sticks and burrs, while
8228-677: The law of the land as a result of the Missouri Compromise . The land near modern-day Lake Village in Chicot County, Arkansas was acquired in the 1820s and 1830s by Abner Johnson , a planter from Kentucky . Johnson served as the Sheriff of Chicot County from 1830 to 1834. His plantation spanned 2,200 acres, with 42 African American slaves working in the cotton fields. By 1836, the Arkansas Territory had become
8349-498: The like. Although it, like the schoolroom, was most often within the main house or another structure, it was not at all rare for a complex to have a separate plantation office. John C. Calhoun used his plantation office at his Fort Hill plantation in Clemson, South Carolina as a private sanctuary of sorts, with it utilized as both study and library during his twenty-five year residency. Another structure found on some estates
8470-422: The machine to harvest cotton: it still had to be picked by hand. The invention has thus been identified as an inadvertent contributing factor to the outbreak of the American Civil War . Modern automated cotton gins use multiple powered cleaning cylinders and saws, and offer far higher productivity than their hand-powered precursors. Cotton fibers are produced in the seed pods ("bolls") of the cotton plant where
8591-399: The main house, at least partially due to his social position. It was also part of an effort to keep the enslaved people compliant and prevent the beginnings of a slave rebellion, a very real fear in the minds of most plantation owners. Economic studies indicate that fewer than 30 percent of planters employed white supervisors for their slave labor. Some planters appointed a trusted slave as
8712-621: The main house, well away from it, or both. On large plantations they were often arranged in a village-like grouping along an avenue away from the main house, but sometimes were scattered around the plantation on the edges of the fields where the enslaved people toiled, like most of the sharecropper cabins that were to come later. Houses for enslaved people were often of the most basic construction. Meant for little more than sleeping, they were usually rough log or frame one-room cabins; early examples often had chimneys made of clay and sticks. Hall and parlor houses (two rooms) were also represented on
8833-442: The meat could also be stored there until it was consumed. The chicken house was a building where chickens were kept. Its design could vary, depending on whether the chickens were kept for egg production, meat, or both. If for eggs, there were often nest boxes for egg laying and perches on which the birds to sleep. Eggs were collected daily. Some plantations also had pigeonniers ( dovecotes ) that, in Louisiana, sometimes took
8954-646: The mid-1880s, the Calhoun brothers decided to sell the plantation, partly because of the flood of 1882. By 1886, it was acquired by the New York banker Austin Corbin as repayment of debt incurred by Calhoun. Corbin built a mansion, called Corbin House, and moored his boat, Austin Corbin , on Lake Chicot. He added a railroad from the cotton fields to the cotton gin to save time and boost production. He also established
9075-417: The milk into skim milk and cream. It was done by pouring the whole milk into a container and allowing the cream to naturally rise to the top. This was collected into another container daily until several gallons had accumulated. During this time the cream would sour slightly through naturally occurring bacteria. This increased the efficiency of the churning to come. Churning was an arduous task performed with
9196-728: The museum houses presented an idyllic, dignified " lost cause " vision of the antebellum South . Recently, and to different degrees, some have begun to acknowledge the "horrors of slavery" which made that life possible. In late 2019, after contact initiated by Color of Change , "five major websites often used for wedding planning have pledged to cut back on promoting and romanticizing weddings at former slave plantations". The New York Times , earlier in 2019, "decided...to exclude couples who were being married on plantations from wedding announcements and other wedding coverage". "Many plantations, including George Washington 's Mount Vernon and Thomas Jefferson 's Monticello , are working to present
9317-415: The next twenty years, with an annual rate of five percent. Each immigrant picked the cotton on his own lot, which Corbin agreed to purchase. When Corbin died in 1896, many Italians stayed on the plantation. Moreover, Prince Ruspoli visited the plantation in 1896. In December 1898, Corbin's heirs leased the plantation to Hamilton R. Hawkins, Orlando B. Crittenden, Morris Rosenstock , and Leroy Percy . Percy,
9438-408: The number of enslaved persons. The vast majority of plantations did not have grand mansions centered on a huge acreage. These large estates did exist, but represented only a small percentage of the plantations that once existed in the South. Although many Southern farmers did enslave people before emancipation in 1862, few enslaved more than five. These farmers tended to work the fields alongside
9559-406: The ones that survived into the modern age and are better documented than many of the smaller and simpler ones. Several plantation homes of important persons, including Mount Vernon , Monticello , and The Hermitage have also been preserved. Less common are intact examples of slave housing. The rarest survivors of all are the agricultural and lesser domestic structures, especially those dating from
9680-469: The original cotton flower, or sticks and other debris attached to the fibers from passing through. A series of brushes on a second rotating cylinder then brushed the now-cleaned fibers loose from the wires, preventing the mechanism from jamming. Many contemporary inventors attempted to develop a design that would process short staple cotton , and Hodgen Holmes, Robert Watkins, William Longstreet , and John Murray had all been issued patents for improvements to
9801-405: The outside, with shingle roofs and brick chimneys; they stood fifty feet apart, with gardens and pig-yards ... At the head of the settlement, in a garden looking down the street, was an overseer's house, and here the road divided, running each way at right angles; on one side to barns and a landing on the river, on the other toward the mansion ... A crucial residential structure on larger plantations
9922-504: The overseer, and in Louisiana free black overseers were also used. Another residential structure largely unique to plantation complexes was the garconnière or bachelors' quarters. Mostly built by Louisiana Creole people , but occasionally found in other parts of the Deep South formerly under the dominion of New France , they were structures that housed the adolescent or unmarried sons of plantation owners. At some plantations it
10043-553: The people they enslaved. Of the estimated 46,200 plantations existing in 1860, 20,700 had 20 to 30 enslaved people and 2,300 had a workforce of a hundred or more, with the rest somewhere in between. Many plantations were operated by absentee-landowners and never had a main house on site. Just as vital and arguably more important to the complex were the many structures built for the processing and storage of crops, food preparation and storage, sheltering equipment and animals, and various other domestic and agricultural purposes. The value of
10164-405: The plantation came from its land and the enslaved people who toiled on it to produce crops for sale. These same people produced the built environment: the main house for the plantation owner, the slave cabins , barns, and other structures of the complex. The materials for a plantation's buildings, for the most part, came from the lands of the estate. Lumber was obtained from the forested areas of
10285-406: The plantation landscape, offering a separate room for eating and sleeping. Sometimes dormitories and two-story dwellings were also used to house enslaved people. Earlier examples rested on the ground with a dirt floor, but later examples were usually raised on piers for ventilation. Most of these represent the dwellings constructed for enslaved people who worked in the fields. Rarely though, such as at
10406-488: The plantation to Robert P. Pepper of Kentucky. Two years later, in 1868, it was acquired by Major William Starling of the William Starling Company, through inheritance. In 1881, the plantation was acquired by John C. Calhoun II , the grandson of John C. Calhoun , and his brother, Patrick Calhoun . The brothers were seen as prominent financiers and builders of the " New South ". Together, they founded
10527-732: The plantation, used to house both horses and mules . These were usually separate, one for each type of animal. The mule stable was the most important on the vast majority of estates, since the mules did most of the work, pulling the plows and carts . Barns not involved in animal husbandry were most commonly the crib barn ( corn cribs or other types of granaries ), storage barns, or processing barns. Crib barns were typically built of unchinked logs , although they were sometimes covered with vertical wood siding. Storage barns often housed unprocessed crops or those awaiting consumption or transport to market. Processing barns were specialized structures that were necessary for helping to actually process
10648-599: The plantation. Common crops included corn , upland cotton , sea island cotton , rice , sugarcane , and tobacco . Besides those mentioned earlier, cattle , ducks , goats , hogs , and sheep were raised for their derived products and/or meat. All estates would have possessed various types of animal pens, stables , and a variety of barns . Many plantations utilized a number of specialized structures that were crop-specific and only found on that type of plantation. Plantation barns can be classified by function , depending on what type of crop and livestock were raised. In
10769-405: The plantations have pushed back against hearing about slavery. Cotton gin A cotton gin —meaning "cotton engine " —is a machine that quickly and easily separates cotton fibers from their seeds, enabling much greater productivity than manual cotton separation. The separated seeds may be used to grow more cotton or to produce cottonseed oil . Handheld roller gins had been used in
10890-602: The planter in matters of daily management. Usually perceived as uncouth, ill-educated, and low-class, he had the often despised task of meting out punishments in order to keep up discipline and secure the profit of his employer. Southern plantations depended upon slaves to do the agricultural work. "Honestly, 'plantation' and 'slavery' is one and the same," said an employee of the Whitney Plantation in 2019. Many manor houses survive, and in some cases former slave dwellings have been rebuilt or renovated. To pay for
11011-427: The plants to the fields once the soil had warmed. Then the enslaved people had to weed the fields all summer and remove the flowers from the tobacco plants in order to force more energy into the leaves. Harvesting was done by plucking individual leaves over several weeks as they ripened, or cutting entire tobacco plants and hanging them in vented tobacco barns to dry, called curing . Rice plantations were common in
11132-662: The postwar South. For example, James Battle Avirett , who grew up on the Avirett-Stephens Plantation in Onslow County, North Carolina , and served as an Episcopal chaplain in the Confederate States Army , published The Old Plantation: How We Lived in Great House and Cabin before the War in 1901. Such memoirs often included descriptions of Christmas as the epitome of anti-modern order exemplified by
11253-406: The pre-Civil War era. Housing for enslaved people, although once one of the most common and distinctive features of the plantation landscape, has largely disappeared in much of the South. Many of the structures were insubstantial to begin with. Only the better-built examples tended to survive, and then usually only if they were put to other uses after emancipation. The quarters could be next to
11374-447: The property. Depending on its intended use, it was either split, hewn , or sawn. Bricks were most often produced onsite from sand and clay that was molded , dried, and then fired in a kiln . If a suitable stone was available, it was used. Tabby was often used on the southern Sea Islands . Few plantation structures have survived into the modern era, with the vast majority destroyed through natural disaster , neglect, or fire over
11495-444: The seeds from raw cotton. After ginning, the cotton had to be baled before it could be warehoused and transported to market. This was accomplished with a cotton press, an early type of baler that was usually powered by two mules walking in a circle with each attached to an overhead arm that turned a huge wooden screw. The downward action of this screw compressed the processed cotton into a uniform bale-shaped wooden enclosure, where
11616-471: The seeds. The design was similar to that of a mealing stone , which was used to grind grain. The early history of the cotton gin is ambiguous, because archeologists likely mistook the cotton gin's parts for other tools. Between the 12th and 14th centuries, dual-roller gins appeared in India and China. The Indian version of the dual-roller gin was prevalent throughout the Mediterranean cotton trade by
11737-413: The separation was to prevent the noise and smells of cooking activities from reaching the main house. Sometimes the cookhouse contained two rooms, one for the actual kitchen and the other to serve as the residence for the cook. Still other arrangements had the kitchen in one room, a laundry in the other, and a second story for servant quarters. The pantry could be in its own structure or in a cool part of
11858-556: The speed at which the gin could operate. In the middle of the 20th Century gins using a rotating blade replaced ones using a reciprocating blade. These descendants of the McCarthy gin are the only gins now used for extra-long staple cotton in the United States. For a decade and a half after the end of the Civil War in 1865, a number of innovative features became widely used for ginning in the United States. They included steam power instead of animal power, an automatic feeder to assure that
11979-566: The state. With the help of Emanuele Ruspoli, 1st Prince of Poggio Suasa , who served as the Mayor of Rome from 1892 to 1899, Corbin brought Italian immigrants led by Pietro Bandini to work on the plantation. The immigrants came from Marche , Emilia and Veneto , setting sail from Genoa and arriving in New Orleans, Louisiana . They lived in a house on their own twelve-and-a-half acre lots of cotton, which they were obligated to pay back over
12100-458: The subject written in the early 1870s and later reprinted in 1910 in The Library of Southern Literature . In this article, the author claimed Catharine Littlefield Greene suggested to Whitney the use of a brush-like component instrumental in separating out the seeds and cotton. Greene's alleged role in the invention of the gin has not been verified independently. Whitney's cotton gin model
12221-417: The task. The wash boiler was a cast iron or copper cauldron in which clothes or other fabrics and soapy water were heated over an open fire. The wash-stick was a wooden stick with a handle at its uppermost part and four to five prongs at its base. It was simultaneously pounded up and down and rotated in the washing tub to aerate the wash solution and loosen any dirt. The items would then be vigorously rubbed on
12342-483: The term dependency can be applied to these buildings. A few were common, such as the carriage house and blacksmith shop; but most varied widely among plantations and were largely a function of what the planter wanted, needed, or could afford to add to the complex. These buildings might include schoolhouses , offices , churches , commissary stores , gristmills , and sawmills . Found on some plantations in every Southern state, plantation schoolhouses served as
12463-754: The top eight percent of landowners. In his study of southwest Georgia, Lee Formwalt defines planters in terms of size of land holdings rather than in terms of numbers of people enslaved. Formwalt's planters are in the top 4.5% of landowners, translating into real estate worth $ 6,000 or more in 1850, $ 24,000 or more in 1860, and $ 11,000 or more in 1870. In his study of Harrison County, Texas , Randolph B. Campbell classifies large planters as owners of 20 people, and small planters as owners of between 10 and 19 people. In Chicot and Phillips Counties, Arkansas, Carl H. Moneyhon defines large planters as owners of 20 or more people, and of 600 acres (240 ha) or more. Many nostalgic memoirs about plantation life were published in
12584-671: The upkeep, some, like the Monmouth Plantation in Natchez, Mississippi and the Lipscomb Plantation in Durham, North Carolina , have become small luxury hotels or bed and breakfasts . Not only Monticello and Mount Vernon but some 375 former plantation houses are museums that can be visited. There are examples in every Southern state. Centers of plantation life such as Natchez run plantation tours. Traditionally
12705-527: The upper South, like their counterparts in the North , barns had to provide basic shelter for the animals and storage of fodder . Unlike the upper regions, most plantations in the lower South did not have to provide substantial shelter to their animals during the winter. Animals were often kept in fattening pens with a simple shed for shelter, with the main barn or barns being utilized for crop storage or processing only. Stables were an essential type of barn on
12826-465: The world. McCarthy's gin was adopted for cleaning the Sea Island variety of extra-long staple cotton grown in Florida, Georgia and South Carolina. It cleaned cotton several times faster than the older gins, and, when powered by one horse, produced 150 to 200 pounds of lint a day. The McCarthy gin used a reciprocating knife to detach seed from the lint. Vibration caused by the reciprocating motion limited
12947-407: The years, many of the Italian workers moved to St. James, Missouri , Irondale, Alabama and Tontitown, Arkansas . Others moved to Birmingham, Alabama , where they worked in coal and iron mines. Sweet Hope (Guernica Editions, 2011), a historical novel by Mary Bucci Bush , tells the story of Italian immigrants working on a Mississippi Delta cotton plantation in the early 1900s. It is based on
13068-475: Was a free-standing structure and at others it was attached to the main house by side-wings. It developed from the Acadian tradition of using the loft of the house as a bedroom for young men. A variety of domestic and lesser agricultural structures surrounded the main house on all plantations. Most plantations possessed some, if not all, of these outbuildings , often called dependencies, commonly arranged around
13189-456: Was a plantation chapel or church. These were built for a variety of reasons. In many cases the planter built a church or chapel for the use of the plantation slaves, although they usually recruited a white minister to conduct the services. Some were built to exclusively serve the plantation family, but many more were built to serve the family and others in the area who shared the same faith. This seems to be especially true with planters within
13310-402: Was a very labor-intensive crop to harvest, with the fibers having to be hand-picked from the bolls . This was coupled with the equally laborious removal of seeds from fiber by hand. Following the invention of the cotton gin , cotton plantations sprang up all over the South and cotton production soared, along with the expansion of slavery. Cotton also caused plantations to grow in size. During
13431-430: Was adopted for cleaning long-staple cotton but was not suitable for the short-staple cotton that was more common in certain states such as Georgia . Several modifications were made to the Indian roller gin by Mr. Krebs in 1772 and Joseph Eve in 1788, but their uses remained limited to the long-staple variety, up until Eli Whitney's development of a short-staple cotton gin in 1793. Eli Whitney (1765–1825) applied for
13552-428: Was almost always in a separate building in the South until modern times, sometimes connected to the main house by a covered walkway. This separation was partially due to the cooking fire generating heat all day long in an already hot and humid climate. It also reduced the risk of fire. Indeed, on many plantations the cookhouse was built of brick while when the main house was of wood-frame construction. Another reason for
13673-430: Was an overseer's house. The overseer was largely responsible for the success or failure of an estate, making sure that quotas were met and sometimes meting out punishment for infractions by the enslaved. The overseer was responsible for healthcare, with enslaved people and slave houses inspected routinely. He was also the record keeper of most crop inventories and held the keys to various storehouses. The overseer's house
13794-420: Was capable of cleaning 50 pounds (23 kg) of lint per day. The model consisted of a wooden cylinder covered by rows of slender wires which caught the fibers of the cotton bolls. Each row of wires then passed through the bars of a comb-like grid, pulling the cotton fibers through the grid as they did. The comb-like teeth of the grids were closely spaced, preventing the seeds, fragments of the hard dried calyx of
13915-591: Was closed down and it was broken up in the 1940s. Nowadays, only a historical marker reminds Lake Village residents and visitors of its history. The land belonged to Native Americans, followed by the French, until Emperor Napoleon sold it to the United States as a result of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. By 1819, the Arkansas Territory was established. A year later, in 1820, slavery became
14036-450: Was distasteful due to mineral content, the potable water on many plantations came from cisterns that were supplied with rainwater by a pipe from a rooftop catchment. These could be huge aboveground wooden barrels capped by metal domes, such as was often seen in Louisiana and coastal areas of Mississippi, or underground brick masonry domes or vaults, common in other areas. Some structures on plantations provided subsidiary functions; again,
14157-499: Was the accompanying cost savings while producing cotton both more speedily and of higher quality. By the 1960s, many other advances had been made in ginning machinery, but the manner in which cotton flowed through the gin machinery continued to be the Munger system. Economic Historian William H. Phillips referred to the development of system ginning as "The Munger Revolution" in cotton ginning. He wrote, "The Munger innovations were
14278-475: Was unimpressed by Percy's rosy rewriting of reality. Shortly afterward, Mary Grace Quackenbos , an attorney with the US Department of Justice , visited the plantation to look into repeated reports of peonage. In her report, she agreed that it was practised and added that only prosecution could put an end to it. Not surprisingly, Percy disagreed with her and suggested that the Italian immigrants could save
14399-430: Was usually a modest dwelling, not far from the cabins of the enslaved workers. The overseer and his family, even when white and southern, did not freely mingle with the planter and his family. They were in a different social stratum than that of the owner and were expected to know their place. In village-type slave quarters on plantations with overseers, his house was usually at the head of the slave village rather than near
14520-405: Was utilized to preserve meat, usually pork , beef , and mutton . It was commonly built of hewn logs or brick. Following the slaughter in the fall or early winter, salt and sugar were applied to the meat at the beginning of the curing process, and then the meat was slowly dried and smoked in the smokehouse by a fire that did not add any heat to the smokehouse itself. If it was cool enough,
14641-549: Was visited by the Federal Writers' Project in the late 1930s. The plantation was finally broken up, as tracts of land were sold to individual buyers from 1941 to 1945, in the midst of World War II . Nowadays, only a historical marker reminds residents and visitors of its lost history. Plantations in the American South Plantation complexes were common on agricultural plantations in
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