ABSTRACT
28From 1750 to 1860, Middleton Place, near Charleston, South Carolina, was understood as the corporate headquarters for the vast Middleton rice and cotton production, and symbolized to visitors the wealth, sophistication, and stability of the family’s enterprise. Although the plantation appears to be divided into conceptually clear realms of garden, agriculture, and wilderness, the three realms overlap and comingle. Landscape histories of the plantation have tended to focus on the Le Notre-inspired geometric gardens and the Baroque terraces stepping down from the house to the Ashley River that use a nearly mile-long bend of the Ashley as a water axis at the scale of Vaux-le-Vicomte. But the infrastructure of rice production is essential to understanding this landscape, providing the technology and labor that made it possible while mediating between the gardens and the enclosing rivers, swamps, and forest.
