The Kitchen Yard for Antebellum Plantations A variety of domestic and lesser agricultural structures surrounded the main house on all plantations. Most plantations possessed some, if not all, of these outbuildings, commonly arranged around a courtyard to the rear of the main house known as the kitchen yard. They included a cookhouse (separate kitchen building), pantry, washhouse (laundry), smokehouse, chicken house, spring house or ice house, milkhouse (dairy), covered well, and cistern. The privies would have been located some distance away from the plantation house and kitchen yard. The cookhouse or kitchen was almost always in a separate building in the South until modern times, sometimes connected to the main house by a covered walkway. This separation was partially due to the cooking fire generating heat all day long in an already hot and humid climate. It also reduced the risk of fire, and widely because of the smell of victuals, offensive in hot weather. Another reason was the desire to segregate kitchen slaves from the family’s main living space. Cooks and other kitchen slaves often lived above the kitchen and worked there all day. On many plantations the cookhouse was built of brick while when the main house was of wood-frame construction. Another reason for the separation was to prevent the noise of cooking activities from reaching the main house. Sometimes the cookhouse contained two rooms, one for the actual kitchen and the other to serve as the residence for the cook. Still other arrangements had the kitchen in one room, a laundry in the other, and a second story for servant quarters. The pantry could be in its own structure or in a cool part of the cookhouse or a storehouse and would have secured items such as barrels of salt, sugar, flour, cornmeal and the like. Only a few original kitchen structures remain standing in Natchez with their Plantation Home today and have been beautifully restored. Others are gone due to deterioration and neglect, or may not have survived the Great Natchez Tornado of 1840. Do you know where these kitchens are located in Natchez?
Posted on: Tue, 30 Sep 2014 02:39:12 +0000
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