Kentland Plantation: Cradle of North American agriculture

When Tom Klatka looks across Buchannan’s bottom at Virginia Tech’s Kentland plantation, he sees more than an orderly agricultural testing center. He sees the beginnings of North American agriculture.

In his mind, Klatka conjures the dozens of known and unknown Native American villages hugging Montgomery County’s Fertile Crescent, the floodplain of a horseshoe bend in the New River, where for thousands of years the water has layered silty-rich topsoil.

This land has been cultivated by humans since at least 8,000 BC, according to Klatka, an archaelogist from the Virginia Department of Historical Resources. Klatka has helped unearth much of the land’s history. He’s overseen the excavation of the slave cemetery where the ancestors of the nearby Wake Forest residents lay. This week Klatka completed an excavation of the Kentland slave quarter community, a little “town” where mostly house servants lived. In its history the plantation’s enslaved workforce grew from 20 to 196, Klatka said.

Since 1820, this land has been owned by a succession of white families, including the Kents, for whom the plantation is named. 1,800 acres of the farm were transferred to Tech in 1987 in a land swap. Today the university uses the site to test new farming technologies.

Tech Appalachian studies Prof. Sam Cook is helping research the history of the plantation and work with the university on preservation of the remaining historic structures and archealogical sites that dot the property.

On Kentland, as on most mountain plantations, the cash crop was livestock that grazed the sprawling fields and woods where chestnut and chinquapin trees flourished. Food for both animals and people would mostly have been cultivated or gathered on the land, Klatka said. Enslaved workers at Kentland, similar to those at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, would have cultivated their own heirloom vegetables for food and for sale, and would have hunted the woods and fished the river and streams to supplement their plantation rations.

From Indians to the various European settlers and the enslaved Africans and African Americans, to the tenant farmers and now the agricultural test beds that stretch into orderly rows, this land has been cultivated by humans.

For Cooke, those beds form a full circle. The agricutlure experiments are to benefit today’s farmers. But some of those technologies such as planting mutually beneficial crops such as beans and corn side by side were likely practiced by generations of woodland Indians who lived and farmed on this same plain.

Tags: agricultural research, agriculture, Kentland Plantation, Native American, slave history, slavery, Virginia, Virginia Tech, Woodland Indians