By the side of State Road 41 just north of U.S. 17 an historic marker reads:
This community, settled along Horlbeck Creek in the 1870s by freedmen, was named after the Phillips Plantation. Former slaves of the Laurel Hill, Parker Island, and Boone Hall Plantations purchased the land in ten acre parcels and founded the Phillips Community. The freedmen who settled here were middle class tradesmen and successful businessmen whose descendents still own the land.

(The other side tells of Dr. John Rutledge, the first European settler to own this land.)

A team of artists—Frances Whitehead, Ernesto Pujol, Kendra Hamilton and Walter Hood (WH), who is interviewed here—have been invited by curator Mary Jane Jacob (MJJ) to partner with the Phillips Community as it re-envisions its future and plans a community center.

MJJ: I’M IMPRESSED WITH THE WAY YOU CAN READ THE LANDSCAPE. WHAT DOES THE LANDSCAPE OF THE PHILLIPS COMMUNITY SAY TO YOU?

WH The concept of “reading the landscape” suggests there is a language of landscape that we’re able to understand, whether we’re a professional or lay person. Looking around the land, one can find common threads that begin to create a specific vocabulary. For Phillips, this vocabulary is our means of communication as artists with the community. When we first met Richard Habersham [President of the Phillips Community Association], he talked about the “rural lifestyle.” There are two conflicting readings of Phillips. One can look at this landscape as unkempt, unplanned and amorphous. But when I look at Phillips, a plan diagram emerges. This comes from my background as a landscape designer, and being able to decipher the original 1878 map shown to us by Richard and the other Association board members. It’s very clear: looking at the landscape, you can see those long lots lines which are reminiscent of English planning.

WHAT IS THIS ENGLISH LOT PLAN?

WH In English planning, common space is central: creating an egalitarian way for people to share a resource. Many English colonies were laid out along central spines—roadways, rivers or creeks—that served as the shared resource. To allow everyone equal access, they literally drew a series of long, narrow lots. It was very democratic. This plan type is typical of small New England towns. When you look further west along the Mississippi—and this really caught my eye—plantations were planned with long lots in relation to the river. This happens again in the Lowcountry. All the extant Freemen communities we found through GIS [geographic information systems] exhibit this same pattern. It makes a lot of sense; it’s a very functional way of partitioning land, particularly if you’re trying to provide different families with a usable resource.

Examining the maps of the Phillips Community and looking around the community, you begin to see a pattern of land use that is not visually or physically dense. When a building goes up, you don’t immediately draw/build a parcel line drawn around it. That’s one of the things that make this community unique: the parcelization only shows up when someone sells a piece of land. The landscape, thus, appears open and the rural character of the landscape is maintained. This seems more sustainable than other practices because you are able to change the use as you see fit. So the land directly reflects the cultural history, its patterns and practices. It’s interesting how some governmental agencies look at Phillips as less planned, less viable, a less sustainable way of being in the county. But when you look at the GIS map and around the community, you understand how people live and their relationship to the physical plan. These relationships suggest a powerful planning tool.

There are also some basic, formal elements that are really powerful in Phillips. In a normal subdivision you tend to inscribe things: to create perimeters around things, normally a road or some mode of circulation. But the Phillips plan suggests that no one takes ownership of a resource, that everything touches it, so nothing is inscribed. That’s an interesting way of thinking about the landscape as a resource—as a place where people live. What people like about the rural lifestyle is that the larger sense of a place hasn’t been taken away. So, when you go out to the marsh in Phillips, you actually feel like it’s all one big piece of property. There’s no major road or fence or set of demarcations going along the water’s edge. You can feel the marshland in a certain way because it is open. No one has taken ownership of the edge, though there are thirty lots owned along that edge. Phillips, too, is a multi-generational community, one that goes on from generation to generation. This is something that we’ve left behind quite a long time ago in the American landscape. So Phillips is an anomaly not only in this landscape but also in how we live on the land in America.

BECAUSE PHILLIPS HAS DEVELOPED OVER TIME, BASED ON ITS HISTORIC PLAN, IT IS A LAYERED PLACE. NEIGHBORING COMMUNITIES HAVE BEEN FASHIONED IN THE IMAGE OF A PERIOD OR STYLE. THEY TELL THEIR STORY ALL IN ONE READ.

WH I think newer developments are evoking a particular lifestyle—and this is not new to this landscape. The way they sit in the landscape, separate from it, suggests a kind of lifestyle that’s not about work but leisure. Phillips is a working landscape, and that is in opposition to the values and attitudes projected by the new housing areas. That is probably one of the major issues facing the Phillips Community in the context of these other evocations. I imagine that the surrounding developments look down on the Phillips Community. I think that is going to be a question long-term: how can these two kinds of communities coexist with each evoking very dissimilar lifestyle patterns?

WHEN WE LOOK AT THE MAPS, THERE WASN’T MUCH NEAR PHILLIPS SIX YEARS AGO AND NOW IT IS SURROUNDED BY HOUSING DEVELOPMENTS. NOW THERE IS AN ISSUE OF SURVIVAL. IS THE AIM OF THE SPOLETO ARTISTS’ TEAM TO CHANGE THE OUTSIDE PERCEPTION OF PHILLIPS?

WH As you travel around in this landscape you see that it’s really all about perception: how people perceive living in this place. Some do not reference the landscape and seem to be about erasing a past lifeway, saying that it is no longer valid. The great thing about the Phillips Community is that there are people living on the land in a very particular way that’s sustainable. People lived in a much different way in Phillips than they do today. They’ve made certain changes, but that hasn’t really changed their lifeways. There is a clear set of patterns that exist on the land that make a lot of sense. I don’t know of any other place that’s tried to articulate itself in the same way as Phillips. By contrast, in Seaside, Florida, a set of standards and iconic pieces of architecture were brought in to reflect a rural way of living. They literally went out and documented specific building patterns that you find in the rural South and codified them for use. It’s impossible to understand those building types in that setting. But what we might understand from Phillips is how one puts a building in that landscape: whether it really matters if the building is up against a road or set back; whether there is a fence around the property or not. The landscape at Phillips speaks to an understanding of what the land can give you, what it can provide, and what connection it has to the past. Those are some of the standards we would like to articulate in regard to this historic community. I think that has value and maybe it can change the way we begin to think about our place in the landscape.