page_title: Plantation house
section_title: Plantation house in the Southern United States
hierarchical_section_title: Plantation house / Plantation house in the Southern United States
caption_attribution_description: Destrehan Planation House, Louisiana
context_page_description: A plantation house is the main house of a plantation, often a substantial farmhouse, which often serves as a symbol for the plantation as a whole. Plantation houses in the Southern United States and in other areas are known as quite grand and expensive architectural works today, though most were more utilitarian, working farmhouses.
context_section_description: Most historical research has focused on the main houses of plantations, primarily because they were the most likely to survive and usually the most elaborate structures in the complex.  Also, until fairly recent times, scholars and local historians usually focused on the life of the plantation owner, that is, the planter, and his or her family rather than the people they held as slaves. All romanticized notions aside, the plantation house was, at its most basic, a functioning farmhouse.  Although some plantation houses were planned as grand mansions and were built all at once from the ground up, many more began as fairly rudimentary structures that either stayed that way, were replaced, or were enlarged and improved over time as fortunes improved. In most areas of the South the earliest settlers constructed houses to provide basic shelter suited to their local climate, not to establish permanence or demonstrate wealth or power.
  In colonial Delaware, Georgia, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia, the earliest plantation houses tended to follow British-derived folk forms such as the hall and parlor house-type and central-passage house-type.
  Grander structures during the later colonial period usually conformed to the neoclassically-influenced Georgian and Palladian styles, although some very early and rare Jacobean structures survive in Virginia.  Following the Revolutionary War, Federal and Jeffersonian-type neoclassicism became dominant in formal plantation architecture.
  Large portions of the South outside of the original British colonies, such as in Kentucky and Tennessee, did not see extensive settlement until the early 1800s.  Although large portions of Alabama and Mississippi were settled at roughly the same time, there were areas of these states, along with portions of western Georgia and southeastern Tennessee, that did not see wide-scale settlement until after the Indian removal in the 1830s.  Very little formal architecture existed within these newly settled areas, with most dwellings being of hewn logs into the 1840s.  The dogtrot-type plan was common for many of these log houses.
  Rough vernacular architecture for early plantations was also true in Arkansas and Missouri although in their river regions, and in the southern portion of what became the state of Louisiana, the plantations reflected French Colonial architectural types, often with Spanish influences, well after the Louisiana Purchase in 1803.  Admitted to the Union in the mid-1840s, early architecture in Florida and Texas generally showed a stronger Spanish Colonial architectural influence, blended with French and British forms.
  Some of the wealthiest planters never built grand residences.  One example was noted by Albert J. Pickett, an early Alabama historian. In 1850 he visited Nicholas Davis, the owner of the prosperous Walnut Grove Plantation.  Despite owning more than 100 slaves, he was still living in the large log house he had built after his migration from Virginia in 1817. He told Pickett that he "would not exchange (it) for a palace."  Even Gaineswood, now a National Historic Landmark due to it being considered a lavish example of a plantation house, began as a two-story hewn-log dogtrot that was eventually enveloped within the brick mass of the house.
  After the period of initial settlement, more refined folk house types came from the older portions of the South, especially the I-house, thought by architectural scholars to be a descendant of the hall and parlor and the central-passage house-types.  The central-passage house continued to be popular and could be either single-pile (one room deep) or double-pile (two rooms deep). If it had a porch, it was under a separate roof attached to the main house.
  I-houses were always two stories high, always single-pile, with side gables or a hipped roof.  They were at least two rooms wide, with latter examples usually having a central hall dividing them.  In the South, they usually had full-width one-story shed extensions to the front and rear.  These sheds could manifest as open porche
caption: The main house at the Destrehan sugar plantation in Destrehan, Louisiana, built 1787–1790.  Built in the French Colonial style, the original slender wooden gallery posts were replaced with monumental Doric columns when the Greek Revival-style was popular.
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