The Plantation Revival

A fellow's forum with Philip Mills Herrington, Associate Professor of History at James Madison University from October 30, 2024.

About the Presentation 

More than 150 years since the end of the Civil War, the white-columned plantation house remains one of the most recognizable and reproduced images in American architecture, proliferating through not only buildings but also film, literature, and advertising. Philip Herrington's collaborative book project, The Plantation Revival: White Columns in Modern America, co-authored with Dr. Lydia Mattice Brandt of the University of South Carolina, is the first scholarly examination of the origins and evolution of this iconic architectural form. Across the United States, thousands of buildings—from suburban ranches and governors’ mansions to fraternity houses and country clubhouses—nod to the myth of the Old South. Through close attention to design intention, use, and public perception, this project identifies what makes some buildings “southern plantations” in a country filled with white columns. As the first book on the history and meaning of the image of the white-columned plantation house, it joins a growing body of scholarly and popular literature that interrogates the legacy of the plantation in American architecture, tourism, and national mythmaking.

 Herrington's two-month Batten and First Union Domestic Fellowship at the International Center for Jefferson Studies supports research and writing on the first chapter, which explores the origins of the white-columned plantation house stereotype. Why Americans so strongly linked the plantation house, and by extension the antebellum South and slavery, with white columns is a question that remains unexplored in scholarship. In the nineteenth century, the homes of southern presidents, particularly Mount Vernon, Monticello, and Montpelier, were the only plantation houses widely known to the American public, through both circulated images and text. At the ICJS, Herrington examined how images and textual descriptions of Monticello shaped American perceptions of southern plantation architecture prior to 1900. 

About Philip Herrington

Philip Mills Herrington is an Associate Professor of History at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia, where he teaches United States history, historic preservation, and architectural history. He earned his Master’s in Historic Preservation at the University of Georgia and his PhD in History at the University of Virginia. He published the book The Law School at the University of Virginia: Architectural Expansion in the Realm of Thomas Jefferson with the University of Virginia Press in 2017. His most recent publication, “Fine Airs in the Sand Hills: Richmond Bath, a Summer Retreat in a Landscape of Slavery,” appeared in Buildings & Landscapes in Spring 2022.