Stages of Power: Landscape, Identity, and Class in Morven's Gardens

Morven’s formal gardens were never mere leisure landscapes; they were deliberately staged to construct and broadcast elite identity. This thesis argues that the early twentieth-century garden at Morven – a historic Virginia estate near Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, near Charlottesville – was conceived as an intentional arena for class performance, where design, labor, and display converged to affirm the social stature of its owners. Far from passive scenery, Morven’s manicured terraces and axial pathways functioned as a curated stage on which a wealthy Northern family enacted a self-fashioned plantation aristocracy. Through symmetrical plans, controlled plantings, and choreographed vistas, the garden’s design codified ideals of heritage and power, while its behind-the-scenes labor (largely by Black workers) sustained an illusion of effortless gentility. Public display was equally pivotal: by opening the grounds for tours, featuring them in stylish publications, and engaging with Virginia’s garden clubs, Morven’s owners turned a private landscape into a performance space for status and regional belonging. Organized into three chapters with supplementary appendices, the thesis first establishes a framework for reading gardens as “stages of power” and situates Morven’s design in the context of early twentieth-century Country Place Era of American estate culture. Chapter 1, “Before the Garden: Regional Prestige and Morven’s Identity,” charts the estate’s early history and the social positioning of its interwar owners. It shows how the Stone family – Northerners who acquired Morven in the 1920s – appropriated Southern genteel traditions and local historical prestige to legitimize themselves, setting the stage for the garden’s creation. Chapter 2, “Land as Archive: Sensing Labor, Time, and Resistance,” employs an embodied spatial reading methodology (including on-site walking) to interpret the landscape’s features as a living archive of work, change, and subtle resistance. Reading the ground’s layout and planting schemes alongside original blueprints by landscape architect Annette Hoyt Flanders, this chapter reveals how traces of racialized labor and evolving design intentions are inscribed in Morven’s soil, sightlines, and seasonal rhythms. Chapter 3, “Gardens in Motion: Choreography, Circulation, and Cultural Inheritance,” compares the garden’s initial 1930 design to later modifications (such as a 1940s planting plan) to examine how the estate’s spatial choreography guided visitor experience and conveyed cultural memory over time. Drawing lessons from Monticello and considering the University of Virginia’s modern stewardship of Morven, this final chapter investigates how narratives of heritage are performed and politicized through landscape management. To further ground the narrative, Appendix A provides a detailed timeline of Morven’s evolution, and Appendix B offers a roster of key figures – from the Thacker and Stone families to University of Virginia officials and Garden Club of Virginia members – underscoring the diverse cast of actors who have shaped the garden over time. Rich visual documentation – notably Flanders’s original drawings and a 1923 plan by Lila L. Williams, and historic photographs – accompanies the analysis, shedding light on the garden’s intended design and its contemporary public reception. The thesis draws on a wide evidentiary range, from archival plans and planting lists to estate records, period garden publications and press coverage, commemorative programs, and digital-era blog discourse, to triangulate the garden’s meaning. In doing so, it engages critical themes of power and memory in landscape history: how Northern elites refashioned Southern identity through design, how landscape authorship and patronage were gendered, how narratives of beauty obscured racialized labor, and how preservation politics mediate the site’s legacy. Ultimately, this research offers scholars of landscape architecture, memory studies, heritage studies, and the cultural politics of space valuable insights and an illustrative case study into how designed gardens function as dynamic arenas of cultural identity, historical memory, and social power.