Remaking Wormsloe Plantation: The Environmental History of a Lowcountry Landscape

THREE: Wormsloe Remade: Plantation Culture from the Civil War to the Twentieth Century

{95} chapter three Wormsloe Remade Plantation Culture from the Civil War to the Twentieth Century in october 1861, Confederate artillery at Port Royal opened fire on Union gunboats along the southeastern South Carolina coast. The roar of the cannons shook Wormsloe’s plantation house “from cellar to garret, though the firing was at forty miles distance.” With that thunderous barrage, the Civil War came to Wormsloe. The conflict disrupted cotton planting and the Joneses’ normal routines over the next four years, temporarily leaving the plantation in the hands of Confederate troops guarding Savannah. But the Union victory in the war spelled the end of slavery and ultimately sea island cotton on Wormsloe and threatened the Joneses’ ownership of the plantation. The Civil War and its aftermath would also be a watershed in Wormsloe’s environmental history. Although the war temporarily altered agricultural routines on Wormsloe, emancipation proved to be the most important force in transforming relationships between the plantation’s people and the land. During Reconstruction, George W. Jones experimented with renting the property to northern investors , made sharecropping arrangements, and leased small subsistence plots to freedpeople, all in attempts to reconcile his antebellum agricultural ideal of an efficient, staple-producing plantation with the realities of emancipation. In the end, all of these efforts failed. If the war’s consequences meant that the Joneses had to face a new plantation order, the outcome was at least as portentous for the Lowcountry’s former slaves. Freedpeople throughout the Lowcountry sought their own pieces of land and struggled to define the exact meaning of emancipation. In many instances, these former slaves believed that they had a right to a portion of plantations built with their labor, and the federal government agreed—temporarily. At war’s end, four freedmen laid claim to a section of Wormsloe, though their claims were short-lived. As wage laborers, sharecroppers, and tenants, African Americans also continued to use the landscape in traditional ways, gardening, fishing, oystering, and hunting Wormsloe 1860. Map by Dr. Thomas R. Jordan, Center for Remote Sensing and Mapping Science, Department of Geography, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia. wormsloe remade {97} in the forests and marshes. By 1900, the Jones family still firmly held onto Wormsloe’s grounds, but former slaves and other local African Americans consistently acted to utilize the plantation’s resources in ways that simultaneously hearkened back to the antebellum era and reflected the new postbellum economic order. Wormsloe’s commercial connections to the larger world also changed during the four decades following the war. Sea island cotton disappeared, replaced by fodder crops, pasture grasses, Irish and sweet potatoes, and an increasing quantity of corn. This shift from a staple crop to a more diversified agriculture reoriented Wormsloe’s market relationships, replacing transatlantic ties with more regional markets. The Joneses remained a cosmopolitan family, tied to the American Northeast and Europe through family, taste, and travel, but the transatlantic economic connections rooted in the land and its produce that had contributed so much to their global perspective had vanished forever. The postwar decades also marked a physical and mental refashioning of the plantation landscape. Wormsloe remained an agricultural property, but the grounds became increasingly centered on pleasurable and relaxing activities , from horseback riding to gardening. George W. Jones, followed by his son, Wymberley, undertook these changes with an idealized image of the antebellum plantation in mind. Father and son planted gardens, remodeled the main house, and attempted to preserve the ruins of the colonial tabby fort with an eye toward conserving and interpreting the past, a process that slowly shaped family and visitor impressions of the estate. At the turn of the twentieth century, Wormsloe appeared an impressively preserved piece of the Old South, but it was a plantation as the family wanted it to be rather than as it had actually been. This process of reinterpreting the landscape was nothing new. Noble Jones had remade the coastal forest with early modern England in mind, and sea island cotton transformed a landscape of mixed agriculture and horticultural experimentation into a staple-crop-producing plantation, but the land use changes that took place on late-nineteenth-century Wormsloe were a much more self-conscious refashioning of the landscape. These efforts at re-creating the colonial and Old South continued antebellum trends and persisted into the late twentieth century. They continue to affect...