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{ix} foreword Wormsloe as Palimpsest Wormsloe Plantation is one of the most significant historical, archaeological, and natural sites in Georgia and the entire Lowcountry, and a major reason for its significance is the property’s integrity and long-term proprietorship. Noble Jones, one of the founding English settlers of Savannah in 1733, was also among the first to apply to the Trustees of Georgia for an outlying plantation, and in 1736 he received permission to occupy and improve what would soon become Wormsloe. Since then the property has been owned and managed by his descendants—the Jones, De Renne, and Barrow families—for a remarkable ten generations, which goes a long way toward explaining why Wormsloe remains intact while all around it seems transformed. But Wormsloe is not only a wonder of historic preservation; it has also been a critical site to the preservation of Georgia’s history. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the De Renne and Barrow families were the most avid and accomplished collectors of Georgiana. Indeed, in 1938 the University of Georgia acquired the bulk of the De Renne Library, which included tens of thousands of rare volumes and precious historical documents. Today that collection forms the core of the university’s renowned Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library . The continuing preservation of Wormsloe and the spirit of preservation that has flowed from the place are testaments to the family’s unerring stewardship . But what exactly has been “preserved” at Wormsloe, and how ought the property to be interpreted? When you enter Wormsloe’s imposing front gates and drive along the monumental live oak avenue, more than a mile long, you immediately feel a sense of retreat from the sprawl of Savannah lapping at Wormsloe’s gates. While the live oaks lining the avenue are clearly products of human design, and of fairly recent provenance, if you wander from their protective tunnel you likely will find yourself in mixed maritime forest and within sight of the expansive marshes characteristic of the Georgia coast. Indeed, Wormsloe seems an island of aboriginal naturalness in a sea of subdivisions and strip malls, and this very naturalness lends the property much of its historical allure. The preservation of this natural landscape, then, surely ranks as another of Wormsloe’s central points of significance. Wormsloe also {x} foreword preserves important artifacts of the region’s precolonial, colonial, and early national history. A short walk from the end of the live oak avenue are the ruins of the original tabby fortification built in the late 1730s or early 1740s by Jones and the detachment of marines that accompanied him to Wormsloe. This was a site of early military significance because it protected a “backdoor” entrance into Savannah at a time of hostility with Spanish colonies not far to the South. Wander elsewhere and you will find shell middens that betray an even deeper history of Native American occupation and resource use, or substantial earthworks that date to the Civil War, or even a lone surviving slave cabin that speaks of the plantation’s significance to the history of slavery and the African American experience. It is the breadth and diversity of these artifacts—and others yet undiscovered—and the tranquil natural setting in which they rest that together make Wormsloe so evocative of the past. While nature and history seem to have achieved harmony at today’s Wormsloe , that apparent accord obscures a complicated environmental history— a history that is the subject of Remaking Wormsloe Plantation, Drew Swanson ’s meticulous reconstruction of the property’s many landscape changes since 1733. While others, most notably E. Merton Coulter and William Harris Bragg, have written about the history of Wormsloe’s residents, the plantation itself and the history of land use inscribed on it have received little attention, despite the wealth of available documentation. Swanson brings the methods and questions of environmental history to Wormsloe, and what he finds is surprising . The Wormsloe of today, Swanson demonstrates, is the legacy of three centuries of landscape transformation, and its apparently natural condition in fact masks the substantial changes in the land that have occurred during most of its history. Remaking Wormsloe Plantation is an effort to unearth that dynamism , to find in the woods and fields the legacies of that rich history, and to make a start at understanding what this history of constant change all means to the preservation of Wormsloe in the twenty-first...

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