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{54} chapter two Becoming a Plantation Wormsloe from the Revolution to the Civil War a crow flying across the Skidaway Road and down the Isle of Hope peninsula in the spring of 1783 would have passed over a coastal live oak and mixed pine forest, with an occasional palmetto or marshy slough breaking up the canopy. Moving south, the bird might have wheeled once over Noble Jones’s tabby fort and an adjacent cornfield or two, edged by small wooden slave huts and perhaps dotted by a few foraging cattle or hogs, but from the air, most of Wormsloe plantation would have looked little different from the surrounding marshes and woods. A similar crow soaring over the landscape in 1861 would have encountered a far different prospect. Expansive fields of corn and hay edged the Skidaway Road at the property’s northern border, surrounded by wooden rail fences and dissected by arrow-straight drainage ditches. A large new wooden plantation house stood prominently in a clearing at the center of the property, near a bend in the Skidaway River. An expansive farmyard, flower and vegetable gardens, and more than a dozen wooden barns, sheds, stables, and other structures, including a new cotton gin and a rice mill, surrounded the house. A wooden dock jutted into the river with a view east across the marsh to Long Island, which was largely open and cultivated as well. Although little more than crumbling walls remained of the old fort south of the plantation house, the old colonial fields grew sea island cotton cultivated by more than fifty slaves, who might have looked up and wished that they too could escape the plantation as easily as our crow. By the onset of the Civil War, Wormsloe was a far different place than it had been eighty years earlier, and the changes to both people and landscape were more than superficial. After the revolution’s end, the Jones family turned to sea island cotton as the plantation’s staple crop. Cultivation of the fiber emerged out of the agricultural experimentation that had dominated the colonial plantation and largely replaced diversified horticultural activities with a profitable but demanding global staple. The fiber quickly dominated the becoming a plantation {55} rhythms of plantation life, structuring daily activities around the seasons of planting, hoeing, and harvesting, and the needs of the crop and its culture shaped both usage and perceptions of the Lowcountry environment. With the adoption of sea island cotton, slavery became even more central to Wormsloe’s operation. By the mid-1800s, the plantation was a landscape shaped by race as well as crops. Slaves tended sea island cotton under a division of labor known as the task system, a form of management that divided both land and labor into agricultural units and on most days provided slaves with some personal time (and along with it the master’s expectation that black workers would provide a portion of their own subsistence). The task system, coupled with an antebellum remodeling of the plantation’s built landscape, divided Wormsloe into distinct white and black landscapes. By the 1850s, the growth of the plantation led to an agricultural improvement campaign by planter George W. Jones, Noble Jones’s great-grandson. George sought to make Wormsloe more efficient and profitable through the application of scientific agricultural principles . These efforts produced more cotton, but they also reordered the landscape in ways that placed a great emphasis on Jones’s mastery over both slaves and the environment. Factors largely beyond Jones’s control ultimately would render his improvement campaign unsuccessful, but changes in the Wormsloe landscape would prove more lasting. Following the turmoil of the revolution, Wormsloe once again became a landscape of modest agricultural production. Noble Jones’s daughter, Mary, and her husband, James Bulloch, inherited the plantation in 1775 and controlled Wormsloe for two decades. The Bullochs farmed the plantation on a relatively small scale until 1796, when Mary’s death transferred the property to her brother, Noble Wimberly Jones. Farm activities during this period most likely mirrored colonial agriculture. The Bullochs continued to range livestock on Wormsloe and probably cultivated at least a few row crops in addition to raising a portion of their own food. Plantation agriculture during this period seems to have been almost identical to prewar labor on the property, absent sericulture and the horticultural experimentation of Noble Jones. An estate inventory and a sale...

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