I’ve been tagging my local area for the last 2 years, and where I live, there are areas which are small yet notable, often past plantations or well known locations usually with origins in colonialist’s estates. For example, Clement Hill was a plantation centered on the house called Mound Court, where Benjamin Clement and his descendants once did their business. As such, the location got called Clement Hill. Similar things happened with Viewmont, New Glasgow, Green Hill, etc. What has confused me though is how to tag these locations. Despite all being the same sort of thing, they all get treated differently, even between maps. Yet they are all single notable locations, either inhabited or not, centered around tracts of land where farms or plantation houses were or are present. There are multiple tags in OSM that cover similar ideas, such as: 1. a locality 2. an isolated settlement 3. a plot 4. a farm 5. a named house 6. a residential area 7. a historic location And as I said, maps treat them differently. Some maps treat them as residences while others highlight them like they do hamlets and towns. Sometimes the location is specified as the name of the plot while other times it’s referring to the general area instead. So how do you tag all these similar yet different locations? I’d like an unambiguous “plantation” or “estate” location tag which signifies that the location: 1. is or was a place where an estate was located. 2. is used like a general settlement name . 3. is between a farm, a plot, and a locality or isolated settlement as not all of these locations are exactly any of them. 4. but conveys the one idea of a significant plantation or similar settlement, either existent or no longer existent, that can be surrounded by smaller residences or be a lone estate, as these 2 scenarios are common in rural Virginia and are both considered the same sort of thing.
Discussion
Comment from Minh Nguyen on 24 November 2025 at 23:44
I’m not sure that there’s an existing unifying tag for all these concepts. I’ll pile on one more:
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:historic=manorcould cover a still-standing plantation house, whether or not it still functions as an estate. (One that I’ve mapped is these days considered just another home; another has a local historical museum inside.)