Abstract
Alfred B. Maclay Gardens State Park, located in Tallahassee, Florida, is home to one of the more beautiful ornamental gardens in the State of Florida. The gardens were designed and developed by Alfred B. Maclay between 1923 and 1944, and donated to the state in 1953 by his wife Louise Fleischmann Maclay and their two children Georgiana Maclay Bowers and Alfred B. Maclay, Jr. Mr. Maclay was an affluent northerner who was one of many to buy old antebellum plantations in the Red Hills of Florida for use as winter retreats and hunting grounds. This land was home to African-American tenant farmers, some of whom Mr. Maclay employed as domestic servants, laborers and gardeners. In fact, the land upon which Maclay established his gardens and the majority of the land that now comprises the park were once owned by African-Americans, purchased by tenant farmers and ex-slaves from antebellum planter and Florida Attorney General Mariano Papy in the 1870s. The African-American community on the shores of Lake Hall and Lake Overstreet is historic, having endured slavery, farmed through the mid-twentieth century as both tenant farmers and landowners, and worked at Maclay Gardens as plantation and then state employees, remnants surviving to this day in neighborhoods adjacent to the park.
This project is part of a larger effort to research the African-American heritage associated with the park so that it can be effectively interpreted to the visiting public. It consisted of archaeological fieldwork and analysis that focused on the Cedar Shake House, a historic farmstead on Lake Overstreet just north of the Maclay House, and historical research on the larger African-American community and socio-cultural context. Evidence was recovered via a pedestrian survey and the dating and spatial analysis of surface artifacts that supports the contention that Maclay tenants and former residents Annie and Henry Sawyer’s livelihood had shifted from farming to plantation employment between the late 1930s and early 1950s when the site was vacated, a common trend as African-Americans sought to escape the cycle of debt associated with tenant farming in favor of wage earning jobs on and then off the plantation. While no evidence of an earlier occupation has yet been recovered, no evidence recovered to date precludes the possibility that the Cedar Shake House was also occupied around the turn of the twentieth century by members of the Robinson family, African-Americans who purchased the property shortly after Emancipation. Additional subsurface investigations are currently underway at the site, conducted by the National Park Service. The Cedar Shake House and other historic homesteads located within park boundaries hold the potential to reveal information not just about former occupants’ daily lives but larger transitions, such as shifts from landownership to tenancy or tenant farming to plantation employment, spurred by economic, social and political factors that continue to shape our lives today.
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