Back of the Big House: The Architecture of Plantation SlaveryBehind the "Big Houses" of the antebellum South existed a different world, socially and architecturally, where slaves lived and worked. John Michael Vlach explores the structures and spaces that formed the slaves' environment. Through photographs and the words of former slaves, he portrays the plantation landscape from the slaves' own point of view. The plantation landscape was chiefly the creation of slaveholders, but Vlach argues convincingly that slaves imbued this landscape with their own meanings. Their subtle acts of appropriation constituted one of the more effective strategies of slave resistance and one that provided a locus for the formation of a distinctive African American culture in the South. Vlach has chosen more than 200 photographs and drawings from the Historic American Buildings Survey--an archive that has been mined many times for its images of the planters' residences but rarely for those of slave dwellings. In a dramatic photographic tour, Vlach leads readers through kitchens, smokehouses, dairies, barns and stables, and overseers' houses, finally reaching the slave quarters. To evoke a firsthand sense of what it was like to live and work in these spaces, he includes excerpts from the moving testimonies of former slaves drawn from the Federal Writers' Project collections. |
Contents
Chapter Two Big House Quarters | 18 |
Chapter Three The Yard | 33 |
Chapter Seven Barns and Stables | 107 |
Copyright | |
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Back of the Big House: The Architecture of Plantation Slavery John Michael Vlach No preview available - 1993 |
Common terms and phrases
African Alabama Alex Bush American Slave Antebellum barn Big House brick buildings built century Charles chimney Colbert County Composite Autobiography Conn constructed cook Cotton Kingdom dairy Drawn dwellings example farm feet fireplace Floor plan former slave frame Frances Anne Kemble Frederick Law Olmsted Front elevation gardens George Georgetown County Georgia Press Greenwood Press HABS Hampton Hillegas Historical house slaves icehouse John Michael Vlach kitchen Lawrence located Louisiana main house Mansfield plantation mansion Maryland mill negro North Old South outbuildings overseer overseer's house owners Peculiar Institution Photograph by Alex Photograph by Jack plantation landscape plantation's planters Rawick residence rice plantation roof Sam Bowers servants slave cabins Slave Community slave houses Slave Narrative slave quarter slaveholders Slavery smokehouse social South Carolina southern space stables structure supp Texas University of Georgia University Press Upton Vernacular Architecture Virginia Vlach walls Westport WOOD yard Yetman