Plantation Kitchen

Plantation Kitchen. Reynolds Homestead. , Cooking in a plantation kitchen was daunting and required constant attention and care. The basic equipment needed for hearth cooking included a swinging crane, pot hangers such as S-hooks, trammels, or ratchets, a minimum of two Dutch ovens, trivets, an iron pot, long-handled tools such as spoons, ladles, a meat fork and a spatula, and a poker, shovel or tongs for handling the fire. Successful fireplace cooking is dependent on the quality of the fire in the hearth. To provide optimal heat, fires were lit two to three hours before cooking began., Cooking spaces on the hearth are similar to the burners of a stove. The back corner of the hearth could be used to bake a pie using a Dutch oven, while a ham could be simmering in the kettle on a crane. There could also be a brace of ducks roasting in a reflector oven, while other side items are simmering, sautéing, frying or being fricasseed in footed kettles, posnets (cast iron skillets with stubby legs), and spiders (cast iron skillets with long legs) over the coals in the front part of the hearth., Kitchen gardens provided crops of corn, beans and squash, and culinary herbs including anise, balm, basil, burnet, caraway, catnip, chervil, chives, cicely, coriander, cumin, dill, horehound, horseradish, hyssop, lovage, marigold, parsley, perilla, rosemary, rue, sage, sesame, sweet marjoram, summer savory, tarragon, thyme, and woodruff., A portrait of Kitty Reynolds hangs in the kitchen. Kitty was responsible for the care of Hardin and Nancy Reynolds' children, and is credited with saving Hardin from a raging bull. However, she should also be remembered as a "mother" of civil rights. Two of Kitty's children, Burwell and Lee, were involved in a scuffle resulting in the death of a white man, Aaron Shewell. In April 1878, the two brothers were tried separately by all-white juries and Burwell was found guilty of first degree murder, while Lee received an 18-year sentence for second-degree murder. The attorneys for the brothers, Andrew M. Lybrook and William Martin, had requested the jury be one third black. They petitioned U.S. District Judge Alexander Rives to move the cases to federal court on the grounds the state court denied the defendants' rights by excluding citizens of African race on the juries and that the defendants could not receive a fair trial in Patrick County due to their race. Responding to Rives' petition, a Supreme Court decision written by William Strong stated: "If, as was alleged in the argument … the officer to whom was intrusted the selection of the persons from 24 whom the juries for the indictment and trial of the petitions were drawn … confined his selection to white persons, and refused to select any persons of the colored race, solely because of their color, his action was a gross violation of the spirit of the State's laws, as well as of federal law.", Ex parte Virginia was the first case which upheld the federal government's right to enforce Civil Rights legislation on the states. As a result, the brothers' cases were reviewed. In a second trial, Burwell Reynolds received a sentence of five years for manslaughter for the killing of Aaron Skelton, and Patrick County released Lee Reynolds without prosecuting him. Judge Rives called two grand juries (including black men) that eventually indicted judges from across Western Virginia for violating the Civil Rights Act of 1875 by excluding blacks from juries., [Caption:] , The indentions in the hearth of the Reynolds plantation kitchen are the result of years of knives being sharpened on the bricks.