In the spring of 1857, travelers along the Washington Road heading west through the outskirts of Augusta, Georgia, would have seen a large and unusual dwelling in the course of completion: Fruitland, the country residence of horticulturalist Dennis Redmond. Redmond, the junior editor of an Augusta-based agricultural periodical, the Southern Cultivator, designed Fruitland not only as the home place of his expansive orchard but also as a model "southern country house" for his planter patrons. The Fruitland plan appeared in the Southern Cultivator in August 1857. Redmond provided detailed instructions for the concrete, or "gravel wall," mode of construction he used to build the two-story, rectangular dwelling, with a cupola rising high above the nearby fruit trees.
Constructed between approximately October 1856 and May 1857, the Fruitland house stood on a slight rise between the Savannah River to the north and Rae's Creek, the southern boundary of the 315-acre Fruitland property. Nearly square, the structure measured fifty feet wide by fifty-five feet long, rising two stories from a platform of concrete that formed the base of the structure. The concrete walls, twenty feet high, eighteen inches thick on the first level, and twelve inches thick on the second level, would keep the house cool in the summer and warm in the winter. Verandas surrounded the house on both levels, stretching ten feet on all sides and supported by twenty solid pine piers. At least one set of exterior stairs gave access to the second level. A double-pitch pyramidal roof topped the structure, capped with an eleven-foot-square cupola that looked out over at least two adjacent buildings—a kitchen and an intriguing "negro quarter" that was fifty-two feet by fourteen feet. The cupola, which functioned primarily as a giant flue to release hot air, overlooked acres of apple, peach, pear, and other fruit trees. In August 1857 Redmond published the elevation and floor plans of his new residence in the Southern Cultivator, providing readers the rare opportunity of seeing an agricultural reformer's lofty aspirations come to life on the printed page.
Although the Fruitland property has received much attention in its twentieth-century reincarnation as the Augusta National Golf Club, its significance as the brainchild of a mid-nineteenth-century trend setter has been overlooked, its origins reduced to the preamble of its subsequent history as a world-famous golf course developed by Bobby Jones in the 1930s. Given that the concrete house and surviving orchard plantings now evoke romantic notions of a bygone South, it is ironic that Redmond implemented these same architectural and landscape features to challenge traditional southern cultural and agricultural practices. Like dozens of publishers of plans for improved houses and gardens in the 1840s and 1850s, Redmond used Fruitland to advance a specific package of values to readers.
For the entire article beyond these excerpts, see "Agricultural and Architectural Reform in the Antebellum South: Fruitland at Augusta, Georgia" by Philip Mills Herrington, The Journal of Southern History, November 2012.
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