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NPS Forth 10.900-a OMB Approval No.1020-0018 (8-86) 16 United States Department of the Interior National Park Service National Register of Historic Places Continuation Sheet Section number �, Page 4 Alexander Hogan Plantation Orange County,NC Statement of Significance(continued) The agricultural economy of the area was also reflected in its social structure. All blacks (primarily slaves) were separated from whites. Whites were divided into either planter families who owned large plantations and large numbers of slaves, or fanner families who lived on small land tracts and owned few, if any, slaves. The common historical designation of a planter was one who owned 20 or more slaves (Kenzer 1987:2942). Although slaveholding defined the southern agrarian economy, it was far from universal. In the mid-nineteenth century only about one-third of white male household heads owned slaves. Furthermore, few such households owned many slaves. In fact,the typical slave owner in the county owned fewer than 10 slaves (Kenner 1987:167). By contrast, the largest slave holdings were concentrated in just a few households. That is, 10%of the households owned more than 70%of the county's slave population(Kenzer 1987:38). A significant change, of course, occurred in rural lifeways following the Civil War. The death of a large number of white men coupled with emancipation changed the county's economic and social structure (Kenner 1987:97-127). Lacking a reliable black labor source, most planters were forced to take land out of production. Consequently, the average farm size decreased from about 285 acres to about 200 acres in the decade following the war. Perhaps the most significant economic change was in the creation of a new type of land tenure called tenant farming or share tenancy. Tenant farming took one of two forms. The first form included those who rented the land for a fixed price while the second included those who worked for a share of the crops (Powell 1989:417). Nevertheless, in Orange County in 1870, most black farmers simply labored under the supervision of another farmer who most likely was white(Kenner 1987:105). This brief historical summary of the economic and social setting of rural nineteenth century Orange County provides a framework by which to assess the archaeological significance of the Hogan farm or plantation. (The term plantation as used here archaeologically does not strictly follow the notion of the term as used above in an historical context. As Orser (1984) mentions, even though an intuitive notion exists of what "plantation" means, scholars do not readily agree on its exact definition. Suffice it to say here that most historical archaeologists would readily identify the Hogan site as a small plantation based upon its acreage and slave population.) In terms of property size and slaveholdings, the Hogan site was typical of small plantations in the county. And while historic documents have enabled us to associate the site with a particular historic family, and historians have provided us with a general description of plantation life in the nineteenth century (e.g., Crow et al. 1992; Powell 1989; Kenzer 1987), none of these are archaeological descriptions based upon the material remains of antebellum and post-bellum plantation life. This is particularly true of the role of slaves who left few personal records, or were seldom written about. Much of the black American role in plantation life is recorded in the archaeological record rather than the written record(e.g., Deagan 1991; Ferguson 1992). Thus,the well-preserved remains of the Hogan site have the potential to contribute significant information to our understanding of daily life on a small plantation in Orange County.