Plantation Maps

Every plantation has a story that no standard map records

The great quail plantations of Alabama's Black Belt, the dove fields of Georgia and the Carolinas, the mixed sporting estates of the upper South — these are landscapes with a particular weight of history. Most have been in families for generations. Many carry the memory of communities, ownership patterns and ways of life that predate the plantation itself. A Rural Maps commission captures all of it: the sporting land as it functions today, and the history beneath it.

The maps hang in lodges and main houses, studied by guests with a drink in hand. They are often the most visited objects in the room.

Sedgefields Plantation, Alabama

The client's historian had spent thirteen years writing the published history of Sedgefields — several hundred pages, a short print run, sitting on the coffee table in Alabama. Visitors flick through it for a few minutes.

The map hangs in the hallway by the front door. It is the first thing guests and family see when they arrive and the last when they leave. They stand in front of it with an old fashioned in hand and pour over it — finding the places where the stories happened, the Muscogee trails marked on the land, the lost churches located, two centuries of history given a sense of place.

Much of what the map contains was not in the book. It came from studying aerial photographs taken in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s — reading the land from above for the shadows and marks of structures long since gone. From conversations with neighbouring landowners. From an afternoon with a woman now in her eighties who grew up on the property and remembered things that exist in no archive. From walking and driving the land until the hundred or so vanished homestead and farmstead sites had been found, identified and recorded.

Much of what the survey produced came from the Bullock County archives — centuries of records held in the local historian's garage, opened occasionally to interested locals. Anthony sat with him, identified what was relevant, and distilled that knowledge onto the map. Raymond Harbert discovered facts about his own land that he had not known. The historian's life work found the audience it deserved.

The historian's thirteen years and Rural Maps' eighteen months ended up in the same room. One sits on the coffee table. The other is on the wall. When the map was finished, Mr. Harbert asked Anthony to contribute a supplementary chapter to the published history — to add what the survey had found that the archive had not.

The Sedgefields Commission - what it involved

-       Two 10 day site visits over two seasons.

-       200 years of records researched in full alongside a local historian

-       The Bullock County archives - centuries of county records held in the historian's garage, opened to Rural Maps for the first time. Raymond Harbert discovered facts about his own land he had not previously known.

-       Lost cemeteries, lost churches and surviving Muscogee Creek hunting trails located and mapped

-       Nearly 100 vanished farmsteads, houses, wells and structures recorded

-       The condensed history of the property — divided by era from the Muscogee Creek homeland to the present day — typeset and embedded within the framed print itself

-       The etymology of every named site recorded: Muscogee tribal owners, sharecropping families, Civil War veterans, the stories behind every creek, trail and woodland

-       75,000 individual trees surveyed across the hunting courses

-       The framed print measures 9ft × 5ft