FIGURE 13.2 A Southern Plantation Slavery determined how masters laid out their plantations and where they situated their big houses and slave quarters. This model of the Hermitage, the mansion built in 1830 for Henry McAlpin, a Georgia rice planter, shows the overseer’s house poised halfway between the owner’s mansion and the slave huts.

Data source: Back of the Big House: The Architecture of Plantation Slavery by John Michael Vlach. Copyright © 1993 by the University of North Carolina Press. Original illustration property of the Historic American Buildings Survey, a division of the National Park Service.