Abstract
Since 1981, 18th-century formal gardens and landscapes in Annapolis have been archaeologically explored to demonstrate that they are exercises in using solid geometry to control perspective. Building on this earlier work, William Paca’s last garden, built on Wye Island in the late 1700s, is interpreted to explore the methods by which these gardens were constructed and the meanings and uses of the gardens. Scholars have suggested that by the 1720s the genteel in America routinely created gardens as extensions of their homes. The desire to manage the views in gardens is in the application of the laws of geometry to wilderness. It is suggested that these ordered landscapes, as centerpieces of leisure in the midst of the working plantation and as places to display oneself to visitors and workers alike, were also consonant with slaveholder ideology and the ideals of the new republic.
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An Erratum for this article can be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/BF03376710
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Leone, M.P., Harmon, J.M. & Neuwirth, J.L. Perspective and Surveillance in Eighteenth-Century Maryland Gardens, Including William Paca’s Garden on Wye Island. Hist Arch 39, 138–158 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03376708
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03376708