page_title: Plantation complexes in the Southern United States
section_title: Agricultural structures
hierarchical_section_title: Plantation complexes in the Southern United States / The plantation complex / Agricultural structures
caption_attribution_description: English: Ruined sugar mill on the grounds of the Laurel Valley Sugar Plantation, located off Louisiana Highway 308 northeast of Thibodaux in Lafourche Parish, Louisiana, United States. Built circa 1840, it was abandoned after being destroyed by Hurricane Betsy in 1965. The remnants of the plantation compose a historic district that is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
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: The agricultural structures on plantations had some basic structures in common and others that varied widely.  They depended on what crops and animals were raised on the plantation.  Common crops included corn, upland cotton, sea island cotton, rice, sugarcane, and tobacco.  Besides those mentioned earlier, cattle, ducks, goats, hogs, and sheep were raised for their derived products and/or meat. All estates would have possessed various types of animal pens, stables, and a variety of barns.  Many plantations utilized a number of specialized structures that were crop-specific and only found on that type of plantation.
  Plantation barns can be classified by function, depending on what type of crop and livestock were raised.  In the upper South, like their counterparts in the North, barns had to provide basic shelter for the animals and storage of fodder.  Unlike the upper regions, most plantations in the lower South did not have to provide substantial shelter to their animals during the winter.  Animals were often kept in fattening pens with a simple shed for shelter, with the main barn or barns being utilized for crop storage or processing only.  Stables were an essential type of barn on the plantation, used to house both horses and mules.  These were usually separate, one for each type of animal.  The mule stable was the most important on the vast majority of estates, since the mules did most of the work, pulling the plows and carts.
  Barns not involved in animal husbandry were most commonly the crib barn (corn cribs or other types of granaries), storage barns, or processing barns. Crib barns were typically built of unchinked logs, although they were sometimes covered with vertical wood siding.  Storage barns often housed unprocessed crops or those awaiting consumption or transport to market. Processing barns were specialized structures that were necessary for helping to actually process the crop.
  Tobacco plantations were most common in certain parts of Georgia, Kentucky, Missouri, North Carolina, Tennessee, South Carolina, and Virginia.  The first agricultural plantations in Virginia were founded on the growing of tobacco.  Tobacco production on plantations was very labor-intensive.  It required the entire year to gather seeds, start them growing in cold frames, and then transplant the plants to the fields once the soil had warmed.  Then the slaves had to weed the fields all summer and remove the flowers from the tobacco plants in order to force more energy into the leaves. Harvesting was done by plucking individual leaves over several weeks as they ripened, or cutting entire tobacco plants and hanging them in vented tobacco barns to dry, called curing.
  Rice plantations were common in the South Carolina Lowcountry. Until the 19th century, rice was threshed from the stalks and the husk was pounded from the grain by hand, a very labor-intensive endeavor. Steam-powered rice pounding mills had become common by the 1830s.  They were used to thresh the grain from the inedible chaff.  A separate chimney, required for the fires powering the steam engine, was adjacent to the pounding mill and often connected by an underground system. The winnowing barn, a building raised roughly a story off of the ground on posts, was used to separate the lighter chaff and dust from the rice.
  Sugar plantations were most commonly found in Louisiana.  In fact, Louisiana produced almost all of the sugar grown in the United States during the antebellum period. From one-quarter to one-half of all sugar consumed in the United States came from Louisiana sugar plantations.  Plantations grew sugarcane from Louisiana's colonial era onward, but large scale production did not begin until the 1810s and 1820s.  A successful sugar plantation required a skilled retinue of hired labor and slaves.
  The most specialized structure on a sugar plantation was the sugar mill (sugar house), where, by the 1830s, the steam-powered mill crushed the sugarcane stalks between rollers.  This squeezed the juice from the stalks and the cane juice would run out the bottom of the mill
caption: Ruins of a sugar mill at Laurel Valley Plantation in Thibodaux, Louisiana.
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