http://books.google.com/books?id=CSayiG018z8C&dq=back+of+the+big+house+the+architecture+of+plantation+slavery&printsec=frontcover&source=bn&hl=en&ei=DfqcS_jdDYO78gbE6p2jDg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=5&ved=0CB8Q6AEwBA#v=onepage&q=&f=false I enjoyed the outdoor kitchen video that was in my email this morning. I can see that many of the set ups were quite temporary. Since I am quite familiar with an historic outdoor kitchen, I thought I might share it with y'all. This kitchen is described in 'Back of the Bighouse' along with several others. The book is previewed on Google and fortunately the Magnolia Grove kitchen is included. This building - along with several other outbuildings and the big house itself is just down the street from me. I was a tour guide here for some 20 years so I got quite familiar with the details of the kitchen.
The details of the kitchen are outlined on p. 53 of the above link.
The kitchen has two large rooms at the east and west end of the building-- these rooms were the kitchen proper and the cooks' quarters. Each room has a large fireplace that extends down into the basement rooms. The basement has a sand cellar, but it may have had a floor of bricks set in sand originally. The basement has 3 rooms - a large room on the west end had shelves with canned food when I got there in 1987. The other 2 rooms on the east end were accessed through a separate door on the south side. The central wall between these two rooms had an additional fireplace.
You can't get from one room in the basement to another without going outside. The upstairs rooms however were connected, but the interior door may not be original to the building. There are separate entrances to each of the upper rooms from outside doors accessed at the top of the stairs you see on the front elevation plan of the building.
There is a veranda - facing south and a courtyard which had a well so fresh
water and shade for shelling peas were part of the outdoor space. The basement is very cool -- and its quite a pleasant place to hang out on a hot humid Alabama day. After the building was no longer used, the basement of the kitchen was a favorite hang out for snakes,
The building behind the kitchen is a smoke house. The family always had hogs dating back to the 1830s - so this is where they were processed and stored for a steady supply of bacon, ham and smoked pork chops.
To get to the kitchen chapter of the book, click on Kitchens in the table of contents, p. 43 then scroll to p. 53 for the blueprints and photos of the 1840s kitchen at Magnolia Grove in Greensboro, Alabama.
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