Resgate Farm () is a former 19th-century coffee plantation located in the municipality of Bananal, in the state of São Paulo. It is part of the so-called Paraíba Valley of São Paulo and is listed as a Historic Heritage site by Council for the Defense of Historical, Archaeological, Artistic and Tourist Heritage (CONDEPHAAT).
Coffee economy The coffee cycle was a period in Brazil's economic history, beginning in the mid-19th century and ending in 1930, during which coffee was the main product of the Brazilian economy. Coffee production developed rapidly throughout the 19th century, so that by the 1850s it already accounted for nearly half of Brazilian exports. The center-south region was chosen for cultivation because it offered the most suitable climatic conditions and soil, according to the needs of the coffee plant. The first major cultivated region was the Vale do Rio Paraíba (between São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro).
Having begun to be cultivated in 1825, the valley gathered, by the mid-19th century, the “largest share of Brazilian wealth.” The plantations followed the pattern of large American plantations—vast monoculture estates that relied on enslaved labor. Moving up the Paraíba River, coffee plantations reached São Paulo and the border region of Minas Gerais.Edriano Abreu, Isabel Cristina Leite, Regiani Moutone Viviane Silva Gonzaga (2021). «Bernoulli 2a Série Ciências Humanas e Linguagem – Volume 1». Belo Horizonte: Editora DRP Ltda.
In 1887 Bananal was the second-largest slaveholding municipality, with 4,182 enslaved inhabitants, surpassed only by Campinas, which had 9,986. It also ranked second in terms of the value of enslaved people living there: 2,604 contos de réis (in Campinas, 6,851 contos de réis). Bananal could thus be considered one of the municipalities "of the greatest importance in coffee production."TAUNAY, Affonso de E. História do café no Brasil. v. 6. tomo 4. Rio de Janeiro: Departamento Nacional do Café, 1939.
During the period of accelerated growth of coffee cultivation in the Paraíba Valley region, more specifically between 1836 and 1837, the then village of Bananal produced 64,822 arrobas of coffee (nearly 1 ton), representing 11% of the total production of the province of São Paulo. In Bananal, 82 farms were established, with 8 sugar mills and 12 aguardente distilleries. Each of them had its location carefully analyzed:the choice of site; the layout of the settlement; the conditioning by the presence of water for the use of hydraulic energy; and the suitability of the buildings intended for processing, storage, housing, and subsidiary activities [...].
History In 1776 the place known as "Resgate," in the province of São Paulo, near the border with what was then the province of Rio de Janeiro, gave rise to what years later would become Fazenda Resgate, in the present-day municipality of Bananal, in the Paraíba Valley of São Paulo. This site belonged to Fazenda Três Barras, the head of the sesmaria granted to Father Antônio Fernandes da Cruz. It became a farm in 1828 as a wedding dowry for Alda Rumana de Oliveira upon her marriage to Colonel Inácio Gabriel Monteiro de Barros. At that time, the property produced lard, corn, beans, flour, small quantities of coffee, and had only 77 enslaved people.Sterman, Gabriel González. As finanças da cafeicultura escravista brasileira na era do tráfico ilegal, 1831 – 1850. São Paulo, 2025.
In 1833 Fazenda Resgate (where 80 enslaved people worked) was purchased by José de Aguiar Toledo, an Azorean (therefore Portuguese) merchant who arrived in Brazil around 1750. Toledo came to Bananal in the early 19th century, bringing from Minas Gerais the architectural solution implemented on the farm and pioneering large-scale coffee planting in the region. The farm was soldfor the price and sum of eighty contos de réis, for which account twenty contos de réis were received immediately, and another twenty contos de réis, for which a receipt was issued on the twenty-fifth of April of eighteen hundred and thirty-four, [...] and likewise upon the execution of this deed another twenty contos de réis were received, namely the sum of twelve contos three hundred and fifty-two thousand and eight hundred réis in current currency, and another seven contos four hundred and forty-seven thousand and two hundred réis in an order drawn upon Antônio Tertuliano dos Santos, in Rio de Janeiro.Tertuliano was Toledo's commissioner and transferred the amount by means of a payment order. It is known that half of the negotiated value corresponded to the enslaved people who were already working at the site.
In 1838, upon Toledo's death, the productive complex headed by Fazenda Resgate (with 137,500 coffee trees and 134 enslaved people) was left to his eight children (Maria, Eufrazia, Ignacia, Maria, Antonio, Manoel, Aguida, Monica). Shortly thereafter, Manuel de Aguiar Valim bought out his siblings and established residence on the property.Moura, Carlos Eugênio Marcondes de. (Org.) Fazendas de café do Vale do Paraíba: o que os inventários revelam, 1817–1915. São Paulo: Condephaat, 2014.
In 1844 the Comendador Manuel de Aguiar Valim married Domiciana Maria de Almeida, daughter of the also comendador Luciano José de Almeida, owner of Fazenda Boa Vista. Luciano possessed one of the largest fortunes in the country.
After the approval of the Eusébio de Queirós Law (Law No. 581 of September 4, 1850), which sought to end the arrival of Africans in Brazil to be enslaved, a report circulated through the lands of the municipality of Bananal of an illegal disembarkation and the involvement of local farmers. The Minister of Justice, José Ildefonso de Souza Ramos, sent agents to investigate the event and,Marco Aurélio dos Santos. Geografia da escravidão na crise do Império: Bananal, 1850–1888. Tese (Doutorado) – Programa de Pós-Graduação em História Social, Departamento de História, Faculdade de Filosofia Letras e Ciências Humanas, Universidade de São Paulo, São Paulo, 2014.on January 16, 1853, 10 newly arrived Africans and one ladino slave were seized in Bananal, on lands of Fazenda Resgate, then belonging to the police delegate Manoel de Aguiar Vallim – who would be dismissed from his position by the interim chief of police, Joaquim Fernandes da Fonseca, at the beginning of February.In a few years, Manuel de Aguiar Valim substantially increased his fortune and, in 1855, decided to carry out a renovation of the manor house of Resgate. Thus Mr. Bruce began the works on the two-story house, adapting it to the neoclassical style then fashionable in Paris. Beginning in 1858, the walls of the main house and the chapel were decorated by the painter José María Villaronga, a famous Spanish painter of the period. The reception room, entirely white, with friezes and gilded ornaments, has a ceiling of very fine taste, and on the panels of the doors delicate paintings representing the most beautiful and best-known birds of Brazil perched on the branches of trees or shrubs of their preference, from whose trunks one sees hanging delicious and variegated fruits. The dining room and the chapel, which is a work of great value, deserve no less praise.A sala de visitas, toda de branco, com frisos e ornatos dourados, tem o teto de muito bom gosto, e nos painéis das portas delicadas pinturas representando os pássaros mais bonitos e conhecidos do Brasil pousados nos ramos das árvores ou arbustos de sua predileção, de cujos troncos se vêem pender deliciosos e matizados frutos. A sala de jantar e a capela, que é um trabalho de muito preço, não merecem menos elogio.ZALUAR, Augusto-Emílio. Peregrinação pela Província de S.Paulo (1860–1861). São Paulo: Livraria Martins Editora, 1976. 237 p. ( Biblioteca histórica paulista, 2 )The farm continued to grow:
According to the inventory of this slaveholder, the latter farm possessed 285,200 coffee trees in an area of approximately 197alqueires of virgin forests, secondary growth vegetation, and coffee plantations.
By the mid-1850s, at the height of coffee production in the Province of São Paulo, Fazenda Resgate already had more than 400 enslaved people. Of these, 49 were assigned to the direct service of the master, namely: five house servants, 13 cooks, five pages, seven seamstresses, one tailor, two wet nurses, eight lady’s maids, one butler, one shoemaker, one barber, two washerwomen, one lace maker, one saddler and one gardener. At this time, the first floor of the manor house housed the slave quarters of the lady’s maids and, in front of the house, there stood a large complex with 36 ranges of slave quarters arranged in a square for the other enslaved people.Marcos José Carrilho. As Fazendas de Café no Caminho Novo da Piedade. Dissertação (Mestrado) Faculdade de Arquitetura e Urbanismo, Universidade de São Paulo, São Paulo, 1994.
Vallim kept the list of enslaved people recorded in a book. Fazenda Resgate headed a productive complex contiguous to it where, in the 1870s, about 600 enslaved people worked. In 1878, a total of 238 were specifically allocated to Fazenda Resgate.
In 1878, when he died, Comendador Manuel de Aguiar Valim was one of the greatest fortunes of the Brazilian Empire and the largest coffee producer in the Province of São Paulo. His inventory included the farms Resgate, Três Barras, Independência and Bocaina, in addition to several other rural properties. Summing all his properties, he owned nearly 400 enslaved people, as well as a palace of "sixteen windows," houses and the Teatro Santa Cecília with its accessories in the town of Bananal. Valim possessed a fortune equivalent to 1% of all paper money circulating in Brazil, composed of numerous public debt securities (including those of the United States), as well as assets in gold, silver and diamonds. Fazenda Resgate itself had 194 alqueires with 304,000 coffee trees.Moura, Carlos Eugênio Marcondes de. (Org.) Fazendas de café do Vale do Paraíba: o que os inventários revelam, 1817–1915. São Paulo: Condephaat, 2014.
But the most important legacy left by Comendador Manoel de Aguiar Vallim was the manor house of Fazenda Resgate, listed as National Historic Heritage by National Institute of Historic and Artistic Heritage (IPHAN) in 1969 and restored beginning in 1970 at the expense of its owners.
Architecture Access to Fazenda Resgate is made by a winding path lined with a row of palm trees. The stone wall surrounding the manor house is of the canjiçado type.The spatial configuration arranged in quadrangles, with the manor house in a position of prominence, allowed an easy supervision of activities across the complex of buildings [...] which was further expanded when activities took place in enclosed courtyards in front of the manor house. Thus, both the control of enslaved labor – subjected to the possibility of corporal punishment and to legislation extremely favorable to the plantation owner – and the control of the work carried out there were at stake.The drying yard (terreiro) was a flat surface painted white in order to absorb and concentrate the heat of the sun, thereby accelerating as much as possible the drying of the coffee beans. The buildings and all their openings were oriented toward this enormous central void within the architectural complex. In this inhospitable space, a few enslaved people turned the coffee beans that “spread over a cement of dazzling whiteness whose brightness, under a scorching sky, is unbearable and soon forces one to rest the eyes on some patch of greenery.” For this reason, the manor house stood somewhat removed from the drying yard and was separated from it by a garden.