Image credit: Atlanta History Center
The previous post discussed the Atlanta History Center’s (AHC) Goizueta Gardens, named in honor of Olga C. de Goizueta. Specifically, it offered a look at the Swan House, one part of the Goizueta landscape. Examination of a map of AHC property*, however, shows the diversity of component sites within the entire grouping. Echoing their 1983 experience, in 2003 Society members again visited AHC during a second Atlanta annual meeting, an event this time coordinated by former board member Ced Dolder and her committee.
As in 1983, they toured the Tullie Smith house and grounds, a site of a highly different nature than the Swan House. Tucked into a corner at AHC and a short walk northeast of its high-style neighbor, the “Smith Farm” as it is termed contrasts with the “designed-on-a-drawing-board” Swan House site by representing a vernacular landscape. A fall 2024 Magnolia discussion of the 1991 Restoring Southern Gardens and Landscapes Conference noted: “ ‘vernacular’ is a concept often easier to grasp intuitively than to define specifically.” Such landscapes “tend to evolve with time, with no, or limited, advance design or planning.” It also might be said that vernacular landscapes develop intuitively as the structures and adjacent grounds best fit the workaday needs of residents.
Prior to the Civil War and into the twentieth century, the 1840s main house centered a true vernacular landscape. It was placed among service buildings, plus (pre-1860s) quarters for the Smith family’s enslaved workers, all being set within a DeKalb County plantation initially consisting of around eight-hundred acres. When donated in 1969 by descendant Tullie Vilenah Smith’s executor (following her wishes) to the Atlanta Historical Society (now AHC) the surviving dwelling and separate kitchen had become overspread by a bursting-at-the-seams Atlanta sprawl. Many in the public history world know that while a donation is one thing, answering the challenge of “how do we deal with it” is quite another. The many details on committees, funding, and building moving can be discovered by visiting the sources linked below or searching out others. The final reconstructed result, however, might be given the seemingly contradictory term of a “carefully-planned vernacular landscape.”
For the landscape purist (and this author struggles not to be one), congregating the Smith family structures with buildings collected from other Georgia sites poses a conundrum of context. Yet, by accepting the Tullie Smith donation and recreating a domestic setting predating urban Atlanta, the Historical Society not only saved buildings of an increasingly scarce type, but also enabled visitors to peek onto a vanishing way of day-to-day living vastly different from that of the Inman family at the Swan House and from the lives of most people today.
Those visitors will discover a National Register-listed two-story frame house built in a regionally-popular manner termed by architectural historian Frederick Doveton Nichols “plantation plain” for its simplicity in ornamentation. Close by is an arrangement of service buildings which in various ways relate to providing food for those who lived on the property, the kitchen being most important. Typically, such cooking structures stood separate from the main dwelling for reasons known to most readers, i.e., the undesirable heat they generated during long warm weather seasons, along with the dangers of open fires in frame buildings. The widespread popularity of pork throughout the South made a smokehouse for curing and storing hams and bacon another vital component of such a setting. The site also features a “dairy,” important for keeping milk and butter cool and protected, while other structures include a barn and corn crib, along with a reconstructed blacksmith shop, chicken coop, and privy.
In exploring pre-Civil War times, the Smith Farm also features a log dwelling that might have been quarters for the enslaved workers. They, in turn, could have devoted portions of their day to tending a kitchen garden, now represented by such plantings as okra, corn, and black-eyed peas, along with caring for farmyard animals and heirloom flowers. Fencing, a necessity in a time of open-range livestock, and a swept yard also help to define the overall landscape and assist staff members in telling the story of this domestic setting.
As noted, the Smith Farm and the Swan House, though of central importance, represent only two components of the AHC total landscape. The Gardens page will cover the remaining sites in future essays.
**************************************************************
*https://www.buckhead.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Atlanta-History-Center-Buckhead-Atlanta.png
For a comprehensive look at the site, see the Atlanta Planning Department report on Landmark designation: https://www.buckhead.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/SmithFarmUDCNomination2021.pdf
For Smith Family details, see: https://tomitronics.com/old_buildings/tulliesmith/tullie2019.pdf
For excellent site images, visit: https://www.buckhead.com/atlanta-history-center-seeks-first-of-its-kind-landmarking-for-smith-farm/
Leave a Reply