Plantations:

Seventy-one percent of Bastrop County owners operated small farms or used slaves as house servants......A.W. Hill had 29 slaves according to the 1860 census.

Owners operated plantations, mostly located along the river where rich bottomland was used to produce cotton.  Across the Colorado from present-day Smithville were the planations of Middleton M. and T.B.J. Hill. (These were Wiley's brothers, and another source states that Middleton bought his land from Edward Burleson for 50c an acre.)

This citation is from Pioneer Women in Texas, by Annie Doom Pickrell

"The Middleton (Hill ) House was an old fashioned one with a huge fireplace, and in the winter great log fires were kept going. There doors were never closed, and one could be burning up on one side and freezing on the other. It seemed the custom in plantation houses to never close the outside doors...

With lumber brought from the neighboring forest and stones also found near by, Hill build his own colonial mansion, differing very little in outline and arrangment from the Governor's Mansion as it stands today. There were spacious rooms and cedarlined closets, and there were negroes in plenty to keep it in order. There were many guests there from time to time, friends of Middleton Hill, himself, and of the sons and daughters...

The T.B.J. Hill plantation boasted a real mansion. When we visited this place, we no sooner greeted the folks in the house than we were off to the "quarters" to visit our colored friends - old mamies and babies. (From the memoirs of M.A. McDowall.)

A concentration of plantations was at Hills Prairie, where "lived the Hubbards, Moores, Wiley Hills, Prices, and Triggs, all the fine houses with good quarters.

There, is still-existing the plantation house of Wiley Hill, built in 1856 and 1857. "All of the lumber was built out of Bastrop pine dressed and tong (ue) and grooved by hand...It took three or four carpenters eighteen months to build," and Adolf Jung, a Bastrop mason built "four tall chimneys at each end of the house with fireplaces upstairs and down." (From McDowall, and Frank O. Hanke letter UT-B) Georger Orts was another of the carpenters Hill's grand-daughter recalls.

"the high ceilinged room, twenty feet square, with their immense windors and doors, the entire front of the house with the massive white columns reaching the blue ceiled roof--(and) the little balcony onto which the upstairs hall opened.

I loved the "parlour". To my childish imagination it was a sanctuary. The great square Steinway piano - the think plush carpet strewn with great roses and clusters of flowers which my great-grandmother Hubbard had sent to New York for; the beautiful opaque window shades with hand painted scences from Venice, the Pyrennes, and Alps; the carved rosewood furniture upholstered horsehair; the brass and iron fender below the mantle, my grandmother Hill's oil painting, painted by a great portrait painter of that time. (From Eva Hill LeSueur Papers)