Negotiated landscapes: culture and material life in late eighteenth-century Berkeley Parish, Virginia
Date
1997
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
Following the instructions for the 1798 Federal Direct tax, Waller Holladay, the assistant assessor for Berkeley Parish, Virginia, evaluated 226 estates within his community. His accounts offer a view of its late eighteenth-century landscape, providing insight not only into the structures on the properties, but into the people who built and lived on them as well. Dominated by wooden buildings and lacking any slave quarters, the estates of Berkeley Parish challenge previous portrayals of plantations in the Tidewater and Piedmont regions and illustrate a variety of architectural choices. In doing so, they indicate cultural contexts and social processes different from those associated with conventional interpretations. Rather than debunking these narratives, however, the material life of Berkeley Parish questions their primacy by suggesting a wider array of possibilities from which to consider the constitution of elite status, women's influence on the landscape, and the nature of master-slave relations.