The Power of Place: Defining Material Culture in Pre-1900 Texas, the Lower South, and the Southwest ed. by Christine Waller Manca

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Power of Place: Defining Material Culture in Pre-1900 Texas, the Lower South, and the Southwest ed. by Christine Waller Manca Kaylee P. Alexander The Power of Place: Defining Material Culture in Pre-1900 Texas, the Lower South, and the Southwest. Edited by Christine Waller Manca. The David B. Warren Symposium, Volume 8. (Houston: Bayou Bend Collection and Gardens, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2022. Pp. xii, 175. Paper, $14.95, ISBN 978-0-89090-203-5.) The Power of Place: Defining Material Culture in Pre-1900 Texas, the Lower South, and the Southwest is the result of the eighth David B. Warren Symposium, a biennial event hosted by the Museum of Fine Arts Houston’s Bayou Bend Collection and Gardens. This volume includes seven revised and expanded papers from the 2021 gathering. Focusing principally on Texan visual and material culture from the antebellum period to the early twentieth century, these contributions share a common thread vividly summarized by Alexis Monroe: “even in Arcadia, there is slavery” (p. 81). The first essay in the volume is Michael Grauer’s keynote address, “As Far as the Eye Could See: The Bugbees, from New England to the West Texas Plains.” Setting the stage for utopian visions of Texas at the turn of the twentieth century, Grauer surveys the history of the Bugbee family, who relocated from New England to Clarendon, Texas, in 1914. Assessing the Bugbee House and collections, Grauer argues that the family’s preference for traditional New England architecture and furniture mingled with a burgeoning taste for western themes, creating a “staunchly American space” (p. 29). Following Grauer’s essay, the volume’s focus shifts to nineteenth-century Texas with four pieces that, taken together, create an evocative backdrop for the Bugbee case study. Tara A. Dudley’s essay, “‘A Very Valuable Man’: Enslaved Builders and the Making of Texas,” focuses on the influence of enslaved craftsmen. Dudley argues that enslaved builders such as Joshua Houston were central to the persistence and evolution of Greek Revival architecture in cities like Austin and that to comprehend the “‘Texas experience’” we must recognize their contributions (p. 61). Likewise, Alexis Monroe’s “The Magisterial Gaze in Slave Territory: Henry Cheever Pratt’s Coons Rancho as Plantation Painting” considers the artist’s painting of a ranch owned by Benjamin Franklin Coons as a document attesting to mid-nineteenth-century expansionist politics. Her analysis ultimately relies on a convincing connection between this El Paso landscape and Nicholas Poussin’s famous depiction of Arcadia inspired by Virgil’s fifth eclogue. Monroe thus draws a meaningful connection between Pratt’s utopian vision of the American West and classical landscapes, both of which were defined as much by their enslaved populations as by their idyllic vistas. Melinda Creech’s “The Material Culture and the Cultural Landscape of the Polley Mansion, Whitehall” echoes similar themes explored by Grauer and Dudley in its investigation of often overlooked contributors to the visual and material culture of privileged spaces. The final three contributions examine intersections of material culture and commerce in Texas, Louisiana, and Alabama, respectively. Olivia [End Page 164] Armandroff’s essay, “William J. Frederich’s Scrapbook: A Palimpsest of the Visual Landscape of a Galveston Man in the 1880s,” studies a scrapbook that captured a snapshot of Galveston at the peak of its commercial success. Drawing a connection between the processes of nineteenth-century scrap-booking and modern-day social media usage, Armandroff demonstrates how the scrapbook format conflated “art and advertisement” (p. 107). She thus argues that “the scrapbooks created by nineteenth-century Americans” provide us with a “palimpsest of their visual worldview,” which was undeniably capitalist (p. 107). The next essay, Lydia Blackmore’s “New Orleans’s Place in the Mahogany Trade,” challenges traditional scholarship that emphasizes the British empire’s influence on the popularity of mahogany furnishings in the United States by drawing attention to French and Spanish preferences in New Orleans before the Louisiana Purchase. Finally, Sarah Duggan’s essay, “Gaineswood Geography: How Commerce Routes and Climate Shaped Life on an Alabama Plantation,” examines the Whitfield family’s geographic and financial expansion from North Carolina to Alabama. Duggan analyzes the design of the...