Labor and Natural History at Woodmanston Plantation (and Beyond).

This article examines the intertwined histories of the LeConte brothers—John and Joseph LeConte—and Woodmanston Plantation in Georgia, focusing on how enslaved Black labor underpinned their scientific careers and the development of natural history in the United States. Born into a wealthy slaveholding family, the LeContes benefited from absentee plantation ownership, which freed them to pursue intellectual and scientific endeavors, including botany and geology, eventually leading to prominent academic positions and contributions to institutions such as Harvard, Columbia, and the University of California. The plantation’s botanical garden, maintained notably by an enslaved man named Dick, gained international recognition, yet memorialization efforts—such as Joseph LeConte’s writings and the 1973 National Register of Historic Places listing—largely omitted acknowledgment of the enslaved people whose labor made these achievements possible. The article highlights how the legacy of the LeContes reflects broader patterns of Southern elite privilege sustained by slavery, the selective remembrance of history, and the ongoing challenges of honoring the full context of scientific and cultural contributions shaped by enslaved labor. [Extracted from the article]