page_title: Plantation complexes in the Southern United States
hierarchical_section_title: Plantation complexes in the Southern United States
caption_attribution_description: English: Cropped version of File:StratfordHallPlantationPano.jpg, which is a panoramic image made from five photos taken Aug 2007 at en:Stratford Hall Plantation and merged together with AutoStitch.
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: A plantation complex in the Southern United States is the built environment (or complex) 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 (pre-American Civil War). 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. In contrast, the primary focus of a plantation was the production of cash crops, with enough staple food crops produced to feed the population of the estate and the livestock. A common definition of what constituted a plantation is that it typically had 500 to 1,000 acres (2.0 to 4.0 km²) or more of land and produced one or two cash crops for sale. Other scholars have attempted to define it by the number of slaves that were owned.
caption: Stratford Hall is a classic example of Southern plantation architecture, built on an H-plan and completed in 1738 near Lerty, Virginia. It was the childhood home of two American patriots and signers of the Declaration of Independence: Richard Lee and Francis Lee.
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