"A plantation is much like a person, exhibiting a personality through its sequence of ownership and landscape expression." -- from Delta Sugar
In Delta Sugar: Louisiana's Vanishing Plantation Landscape, John B. Rehder offers a sweeping historical treatment of Louisiana's longstanding sugar industry. Tracing the industry's transplantation from its sources in the Caribbean, Rehder includes many aspects of material culture that have been changed over time by technology, culture, and marketplace. Along the way, he demonstrates exactly what makes a plantation a plantation, comparing it to other forms of agricultural production and examining the types of buildings and design that make up this erstwhile form. To know the land and its people, Rehder says, one must follow an evolutionary journey reflected by plantation architecture. This distinctive book combines analyses of landscape, economy, architecture, and agronomy, probing the long-term evolution of the sugarcane trade from Old World industry to French Caribbean legacy. The text is enhanced by production charts, parish and state geographic maps, and more than one hundred historic and contemporary illustrations.
Combining material history and cultural geography, Delta Sugar: Louisiana's Vanishing Plantation Landscape offers a comprehensive and vivid portrait of the rise and fall of a unique agricultural industry and its distinctive arrangements for production.