Remaking Wormsloe Plantation: The Environmental History of a Lowcountry Landscape

FOUR: “Worth Crossing Oceans to See”: The Transition from an Agricultural to an Ornamental Landscape

{129} chapter four Worth Crossing Oceans to See” The Transition from an Agricultural to an Ornamental Landscape around midday on september 29, 1896, a hurricane made landfall near Tybee Island, packing sustained winds of close to 110 miles per hour. The storm surged up the Savannah River, destroying homes, uprooting trees, swamping rice impoundments, and leveling cotton fields as it went. The hurricane had earlier made a circuitous passage across the Florida peninsula from the Gulf of Mexico to the Atlantic, leaving severe damage in Jacksonville, Brunswick, and Darien as it skirted the bight of northeastern Florida and coastal Georgia. As the storm plowed over Savannah, it drove boats ashore on the Isle of Hope, destroyed churches and warehouses, and toppled “more than half the trees” in Forsyth Park. Ferocious winds forced salt water over lowlying stretches of the coast, temporarily blurring the boundaries between sea and land. When the hurricane had passed, it left in its wake at least seventeen dead in the city’s vicinity and more than a million dollars in property damage. On Wormsloe, the powerful storm ripped through the plantation’s forests, snapping the tops off longleaf pines and downing trees. The 1896 hurricane was but one of a regular parade of tropical storms that periodically swept over the Georgia Lowcountry. Every few years, ocean currents, winds, and tropical lows combined to bring the storms ashore somewhere along the southern Atlantic coast, but several monstrous storms stand out. A “Great Hurricane” killed five sailors off the mouth of the Savannah River in 1752. A massive 1804 cyclone sent a tidal surge over the Georgia and South Carolina barrier islands, washing away crops of rice and cotton and killing more than five hundred Lowcountry residents. Another storm blasted Wormsloe in 1854 as George W. Jones was moving his base of agricultural operations to the plantation, leaving “a terrible path behind it of crops destroyed, & property of every kind injured.” These powerful storms destroyed property and disrupted human, animal, and plant life, but they also continued to replenish and renew coastal ecosystems, as storms had for thousands of years. Wind-toppled trees created “ Wormsloe 1910. Map by Dr. Thomas R. Jordan, Center for Remote Sensing and Mapping Science, Department of Geography, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia. “worth crossing oceans to see” {131} openings for new understory growth, certain bird and insect species relied on the resulting downed logs and dead snags, and storm surges deposited loads of nutrients across the salt marsh. Equally important as the tropical storms that periodically pounded the Lowcountry coast, human social and economic activity continued on Wormsloe. The decades following the 1896 hurricane highlighted the plantation’s historic role as a secondary property—a place of escape. By the end of the nineteenth century, after a brief period when the family had tried to make Wormsloe a productive centerpiece, the old plantation had become a family resort, a place where the De Rennes could rest and relax in the salty air away from the urban bustle of Savannah or residences in the cities of the Northeast and Europe. The De Rennes had built a substantial dairy on the property and expanded their market garden production, and they eventually invited tourists onto their historic plantation. Paths of crushed oyster shells and thousands of azaleas, camellias , and roses transformed the former cotton plantation into a flowering fantasyland. Over the next four decades, gradually diminishing wealth limited the De Rennes’ use of Wormsloe as a vacation spot—Wymberley W. De Renne (Noble Jones’s great-great-great-grandson) and his family lived on the plantation year-round—and caused the family to open what was once a private playground to the admission-paying public by the late 1920s. Visitors from across Georgia and beyond traveled to Wormsloe to glimpse the preserved majesty of an old plantation South, often unaware that the decay of an old southern fortune had made possible their exploration and enjoyment of Wormsloe. And for all this transformation, hurricanes still swept the marshes and fields and woods, moving in patterns that predated human changes to the land. In addition to the constancy of hurricanes, human residents’ continual efforts to reinterpret the landscape remained a feature of early-twentieth-century Wormsloe, as it had in the preceding century. Wymberley J. De Renne continued to remodel the plantation’s house and grounds after 1900, continuing work begun by his father before the...