When There Was a Mock Plantation in Brooklyn

An advertisement for “Black America.”

All up and down de whole creation
Sadly I roam,
Still longing for de old plantation,
And for de old folks at home.

The trajectory from those wistful antebellum lyrics by Stephen Foster (who died at Bellevue Hospital in 1864) to the Rev. Frederick A. Lucas Jr.’s fiery invocation of “the plantation called New York City” (at Mayor Bill de Blasio’s inauguration last week) spans more than a century. In that time, though, a plantation actually existed in Brooklyn.

To be sure, it was only a mock plantation and very much, like Foster’s, a romanticized version. It was also short-lived. But there it was, encamped in June 1895, in Ambrose Park in South Brooklyn, near Third Avenue and 37th Street, where today the Gowanus Expressway slices through, a native village erected by Nate Salsbury, the legendary producer of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show.

“Fun for the Darkies,” proclaimed a New York Times headline, heralding the arrival of the “Black America” show and its cast of 500 “Southern colored people.” Another headline trumpeted a show featuring the “Fun-Loving Darky of Old Slavery Days.”

For several weeks, advertisements promised “home life, folk lore, pastimes of Dixie, more music, mirth, merriment for the masses; more fun, jollity, humor and character presented in marvellously massive lyric magnitude for the millions than since the days of Cleopatra.”

If there was any hint of disapproval at the display, it could not be found in any of the coverage of the exhibition by the news media.

“This was a period when ethnography was entertainment,” said Mike Wallace, an author of “Gotham,” a history of New York City, and a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the City University of New York Graduate Center.

David Fiske, a retired librarian and the author of “Solomon Northrup: The Complete Story of the Author of ‘Twelve Years a Slave,’” wrote on The New York History Blog that Salsbury hired Billy McClain, a black entertainer, “to show the people of the North the better side of the colored man and woman of the South.”

What was billed as “a typical plantation village of 150 cabins” promised to depict “with a fidelity of detail” the “labors that the Negroes of slavery days engaged in, and the happy, careless life that they lived in their cabins after work hours were over.”

The “plantation” also included a full-acre cotton field, a working cotton gin and demonstrations and performances by a choir 300 strong.

Salsbury billed the performances as largely educational and, indeed, The Times reported that it presented “an opportunity to become familiar with plantation life to those of the North who belong to a generation to which the word slavery has but an indefinite and hazy meaning.” (In New York, the great majority of slaves were freed by 1827.)

The Brooklyn Eagle concluded after one performance that the audience was “fully satisfied of the versatility of the Southern Negro.”

After touring other cities, the exhibition returned to New York and Madison Square Garden.

The June 1895 Times Article:

The June 2, 1985, New York Times Article (PDF)

The June 2, 1985, New York Times Article (Text)