page_title: Plantation complexes in the Southern United States
section_title: Kitchen yard
hierarchical_section_title: Plantation complexes in the Southern United States / The plantation complex / Kitchen yard
caption_attribution_description: 'Category:Melrose Plantation — Natchitoches Parish, Louisiana. Old wash house built by "mulattoes," now a part of the John Henry cotton plantation.
context_page_description: A plantation complex in the Southern United States is the built environment that was common on agricultural plantations in the American South from the 17th into the 20th century. The complex included everything from the main residence down to the pens for livestock. Southern plantations were generally self-sufficient settlements that relied on the forced labor of slaves, similar to the way that a medieval manorial estate relied upon the forced labor of serfs.
  Plantations are an important aspect of the History of the Southern United States, particularly the antebellum era. The mild temperate climate, plentiful rainfall, and fertile soils of the southeastern United States allowed the flourishing of large plantations, where large numbers of enslaved Africans were held captive as slave labor and forced to produce crops to create wealth for a white elite.
  Today, as was also true in the past, there is a wide range of opinion as to what differentiated a plantation from a farm. Typically, the focus of a farm was subsistence agriculture.
context_section_description: A variety of domestic and lesser agricultural structures surrounded the main house on all plantations. Most plantations possessed some, if not all, of these outbuildings, often called dependencies, commonly arranged around a courtyard to the rear of the main house known as the kitchen yard.  They included a cookhouse (separate kitchen building), pantry, washhouse (laundry), smokehouse, chicken house, spring house or ice house, milkhouse (dairy), covered well, and cistern.  The privies would have been located some distance away from the plantation house and kitchen yard.
  The cookhouse or kitchen was almost always in a separate building in the South until modern times, sometimes connected to the main house by a covered walkway.  This separation was partially due to the cooking fire generating heat all day long in an already hot and humid climate.  It also reduced the risk of fire. Indeed, on many plantations the cookhouse was built of brick while when the main house was of wood-frame construction.  Another reason for the separation was to prevent the noise and smells of cooking activities from reaching the main house.  Sometimes the cookhouse contained two rooms, one for the actual kitchen and the other to serve as the residence for the cook.  Still other arrangements had the kitchen in one room, a laundry in the other, and a second story for servant quarters.  The pantry could be in its own structure or in a cool part of the cookhouse or a storehouse and would have secured items such as barrels of salt, sugar, flour, cornmeal and the like.
  The washhouse is where clothes, tablecloths, and bed-covers were cleaned and ironed. It also sometimes had living quarters for the laundrywoman.  Cleaning laundry in this period was labor-intensive for the domestic slaves that performed it. It required various gadgets to accomplish the task. The wash boiler was a cast iron or copper cauldron in which clothes or other fabrics and soapy water were heated over an open fire. The wash-stick was a wooden stick with a handle at its uppermost part and four to five prongs at its base. It was simultaneously pounded up and down and rotated in the washing tub to aerate the wash solution and loosen any dirt.  The items would then be vigorously rubbed on a corrugated wash board until clean.  By the 1850s, they would be passed through a mangle.  Prior to that time, wringing out the items was done by hand.  The items would then be ready to be hung out to dry or, in inclement weather, placed on a drying rack.  Ironing would have been done with a metal flat iron, often heated in the fireplace, and various other devices.
  The milkhouse would have been used by slaves to make milk into cream, butter, and buttermilk.  The process started with separating the milk into skim milk and cream.  It was done by pouring the whole milk into a container and allowing the cream to naturally rise to the top.  This was collected into another container daily until several gallons had accumulated. During this time the cream would sour slightly through naturally occurring bacteria.  This increased the efficiency of the churning to come.  Churning was an arduous task performed with a butter churn. Once firm enough to separate out, but soft enough to stick together, the butter was taken out of the churn, washed in very cold water, and salted.  The churning process also produced buttermilk as a by-product. It was the remaining liquid after the butter was removed from the churn.   All of the products of this process would have been stored in the spring house or ice house.
  The smokehouse was utilized to preserve meat, usually pork, beef, and mutton.  It was commonly built of hewn logs or brick.  Following the slaughter in the fall or early winter, salt and sugar were applied to the meat at the beginning of the curing process, and then the meat was slowly dried and smoked in the smokehouse by a fire that did not add any heat to the smokehouse itself.   If it was cool enough, the meat could also be stored there until it was consumed.
  The chicken house was a building where chickens we
caption: 1940 photograph of the washhouse (laundry) at Melrose Plantation in Melrose, Louisiana.
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