Agricultural infrastructure and the gardens of Middleton Place

Abstract

Middleton Place, a former rice plantation west of Charleston, South Carolina, contains gardens that are exceptional in US garden history. They are among the oldest extant designed gardens in the United States, and the plantation is one of very few properties in continuous family ownership since the era of the royal land grant. While time, natural disaster, and war all took their toll on the plantation, the bones of the eighteenth-century gardens are intact, and they are the only colonial Baroque gardens in the United States that were never substantially altered (figure 1). The 20-acre gardens were part of a regional landscape of rice production that included Middleton Place itself and the Middleton family’s dozens of rice plantations, and that comprised the South Carolina lowcountry region. Middleton Place is an unusual intact example of a lowcountry plantation where garden and rice fields were two sides of the same coin: landscapes carefully organized, formed, and regulated to guide human activity in the production and display of wealth and prestige. The seat of the Middleton family’s rice enterprise for over a century, the 6,500-acre plantation was renowned for its formal gardens and terraced site, now a National Historic Landmark. Yet despite its significance, Middleton Place has not been studied as an integrated garden and agricultural landscape. Mentions of the plantation in garden histories discuss the extraordinary terraces stepping down to the Ashley River, and the Le Nôtre-inspired gardens that use a nearlymile-long reach of the river to create a water axis at the scale of Vaux-leVicomte. The gardens, altered by war, earthquake, and natural processes, have been interpreted based on their partial reconstruction in the twentieth-century, and problematically, they have never been fully analyzed or critiqued as embedded within an agricultural landscape. Geometric gardens and geomorphic rice fields mirrored each other, as earthworks and water flow organized the two landscapes and structured the daily and seasonal movements of two groups of people, the black enslaved workers and the white planters. The domestic core of the plantation is at the eastern edge of the property, overlooking the Ashley River and organized along a 1,980-foot (30-chain) east–west axis. Within the core, geometrically organized leisure and display areas are located to the north and east, with the productive landscapes located to the south and west where they are organized functionally by topography, hydrology and solar access. A 6-acre parterre garden overlooks the river, flowing down over beveled terraces influenced by Versailles’ Triton Fountain to two oblong reflecting pools and then to the river. An 11-acre pleasure garden sits to the north, and to the south were vegetable gardens and an orchard, along with farm buildings, the work yard, and ‘the street’ containing the homes and gardens of the enslaved workers (figure 2).