From Plantation to Campus: Progress, Community, and the Lay of the Land in Shaping the Early Tuskegee Campus

Abstract

Landscape architectural historians have generally failed to address the experience of disadvantaged people in shaping outdoor spaces. Scholarship in the field has focused, instead, on the stories of the wealthy and powerful as if a lack of money or social status or of advantageous skin color or gender negates the necessity for people to modify environments. Efforts to address this amnesia in landscape history illuminate not only the past of those at the margins of society but also the past of society as a whole by documenting the interactions between the disadvantaged and the privileged. Moreover, landscape “history from below,” as it were, broadens the range of information and inspiration available to modern landscape architectural practice. It is in this light that the landscape history of the campus of Tuskegee University is examined here. The article reviews the natural and cultural circumstances faced by the University during Booker T. Washington's administration from 1881 to 1915. It also explores how the subsequent development of the campus responded to this context—a process of historical recovery that is still ongoing. In this regard, much is still to be uncovered. This examination demonstrates that the desire for progress in the face of the severe constraints imposed upon black people in post-Reconstruction Alabama created innovative approaches to development and to unusual physical results. The historic landscape of Tuskegee's campus serves as an artifact of the African American experience in the South. Moreover, it challenges landscape architecture to expand the ways in which it conceptualizes its theory and practice.