Remaking Wormsloe Plantation: The Environmental History of a Lowcountry Landscape by Drew A. Swanson (review)

Drew Swanson’s Remaking Wormsloe Plantation offers a close environmental study of a remarkable tidewater estate that has survived virtually intact when almost every other early plantation along the Georgia coast has been subdivided and developed. As noted in the introduction, Wormsloe is one of the few surviving spaces where one can simultaneously glimpse the landscape that witnessed the European settlement of Georgia in the 1730s, the development of the modern coastal south, and the three hundred years of history in between. A dynamic tension undergirds this story. Although the property has served as military stronghold, plantation, country residence, farm, tourist attraction, and historic park, owners and managers in the twentieth and twenty-first century have interpreted the estate as an almost pristine colonial site, at least until recent times. Swanson offers a preservation case study of how memories of history and land have influenced interpretations of a particular place, and provides a dynamic model for measuring environmental history’s role in enlarging that perspective.

Over the last three centuries, Wormsloe Plantation passed through five distinct stages in terms of types of landscape, the author argues. At each stage, the ambitions and aspirations of the owners shaped the environment, but in turn were shaped by the environment in unexpected ways. Swanson benefits from extensive documentation that survived through the diligent efforts of a family conscious of its prominent role in the founding of the colony and devoted to preserving that history through the De Renne Family Collection at the University of Georgia’s Hargrett Library.

In the colonial period, a carpenter and surveyor from England named Noble Jones, an adviser to Georgia’s colonial founder James Oglethorpe, acquired five hundred acres on the Isle of Hope near the newly formed town of Savannah. Jones was an experimenter. Taking a heavily timbered tract surrounded by salt marsh, he spent forty years searching for a staple crop that he never found, as he experimented with silk culture, introduced cattle and swine in an open-range system, grew provisions, and planted a variety of botanical species, including subtropical fruits like oranges, pomegranates, and grapes. Most of his enslaved people were concentrated on other properties. As late as the end of the Revolution, Wormsloe still resembled the Wormsloe of the 1730s.

In the second period lasting from the Revolution to the Civil War, the many hundreds of acres of the site were developed into a full-fledged plantation, with Sea Island cotton as the staple crop. Jones’ grandson concentrated an enslaved population on the land and introduced a crop culture fundamentally different from that found in short-staple regions of the South. With an economy of style, Swanson describes what this entailed: a longer growing season than for short-staple cotton, more intense cultivation, a more scientific approach, and reliance on a task system that allowed enslaved African Americans to work at individual tasks but with the added responsibility of using the remaining hours in the day to grow their own food. In the 1850s, the next generation of the family brought about an even more dramatic transformation as the owners rigorously applied lessons drawn from modern, “scientific” farming: guano imported for soil fertility, selective breeding of livestock, and a heavy emphasis on “efficiency” in crop management.

After the Civil War, Swanson delineates yet a third stage of landscape transformation at Wormsloe. The realities of emancipation brought a sudden end to the effort to create an efficient, staple-producing plantation. Without enslaved labor and labor-intensive farming, the planting of Sea Island cotton was no longer viable. The family, now renamed De Renne when the fourth generation adopted the surname of a maternal grandmother, experimented with renting the property to northern investors, making sharecropping arrangements, and leasing small subsistence plots to freed people. Fodder crops, pasture...