Southern Architecture, Surveillance and Enslavement: Reflections on Lived Experiences in the Built Environment

Kelly Pedigo, WPAMC ’24

When I learned that the first stop on our whirlwind trip through the South would be with Bernie Herman on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, I knew we were in for an incredible adventure. At Kendall Grove Plantation, Bernie both metaphorically and literally walked us through the site’s outbuildings. We looked up at the keyhole-shaped vents of a smokehouse, at the peculiar hooks and pegs in the dusty nooks of its hipped ceiling, as he showed us that a building can tell us not just what it was used for but how it was used—how its visibility from windows in the main house, its orientation to a nearby watchhouse, and its single, once-locked doorway rendered it an object readied for constrictive surveillance. What might constant mistrust and watchful eyes have felt like on the backs of the people enslaved at Kendall Grove as they lived daily in this built environment?

The relationship between architecture, visibility, and the lived experiences of enslaved peoples was a recurring theme on our journey. At the Aiken-Rhett House in Charleston, South Carolina, we walked the halls where enslaved families lived. Here, prison-like architecture and an open courtyard below shaped patterns of life, but our guide showed us that in the same spaces where we found surveillance and oppression we could also find self-expression and community. The painted-on mantles decorating flat walls and dark, basement-level gathering spaces may be different materially from their more opulent counterparts in the main house, but they were joyful markers of lives lived in spite of calculated attempts at control. 

Nearby at Drayton Hall, Wood Family Fellow Hannah St. Onge spoke with us about her work investigating such attempts on a much-changed landscape. Using a combination of primary sources, LiDAR, ArcGIS ArcPro, and 3D modeling, she was working to reconstruct sight lines from the main house to the now absent dwellings for the enslaved people who lived and worked on the plantation. This tactile consideration of life in the built environment made the landscape come alive for me and centered the inescapable intentionality of white enslavers in the design of plantation architecture. 

Culture shapes the built environment, but the built environment shapes people too. When we considered buildings as objects with agency, we found on this trip that they were often the agents of oppressors, but within these structures the oppressed also expressed agency. The most significant idea that lives with me after this trip is the importance of telling the stories of the lives that were lived within walls, not just doing the due-diligence of discussing the fact that the walls existed in the first place. This idea isn’t new, and I’m certainly not always the best person to tell those stories, but this trip helped make more visible the ways in which those stories linger with us and how we can better share them with each other.