Hole in the Clouds


Wormsloe

Oct 24, 2013

In 1940, when photographer Frances Benjamin Johnston visited Wormsloe Plantation near Savannah, Georgia, the approach looked much as it had in antebellum times. Twentieth-century horseless carriages left different tracks in the dirt of the mile-and-a-half-long driveway, but intervening decades had done nothing to change the overall effect of oak and moss and ivy.

The original plantation house, however, built in the mid-eighteenth century out of tabby–cement made primarily of crushed oyster shells–crumbled away long ago. A nineteenth-century replacement house is still controlled by descendants of the family that built the place, though most of the acreage was deeded over to the state during the Depression.

In the early years of the twentieth century, the family name was changed from Jones to DeRenne, and the spelling of the plantation was changed from Wormslow to Wormsloe. They must have had their reasons.

tree   driveway   road   Georgia   1940   plantation   Savannah   oak   spanish moss   (Image credit: Frances Benjamin Johnston, via Shorpy)