Plantation Houses

The residence built as the primary dwelling on a plantation, historically the main house of a large agricultural estate worked under a plantation labor system, most commonly the antebellum cotton, sugar and tobacco plantations of the American South. A plantation house is distinguished from an ordinary large residence by its direct economic tie to the surrounding agricultural land and workforce it was built to oversee, and many of the plantation houses gathered under this group are preserved today as historic sites that document, rather than celebrate, that economic and social history, alongside the architecture itself.