New Orleans to Baton Rouge the Plantations

We’d already discovered that there are about 70 plantation homes along the Louisiana Scenic route road, and a dozen that offer tours. We chose three that have different histories to Southdown Manor in Houma and learned a lot about the sugar plantations, the mansions, and the people who lived and worked there. Along the route we were very surprised to see how much water lay on either side of the roads. There were many, many, miles of swamps and effectively, unusable land.

Destrehan, the closest to New Orleans, is also the oldest plantation in the Mississippi Valley. We were greeted with a very warm and humid day and by staff and guides in traditional period costume, complete with petticoats and hoops. Wonderful when in the air conditioning of the gift shop. Not so, walking around in the heat and humidity. We were the first to arrive so had time to have a lovely chat with the guides who were very happy to pose for pictures.

The history of Destrehan begins with Jean Baptiste Honore Detrehan Sieur De Peaupre (1716-1765), an obvious Frenchman whose father was a counselor to King Louis XIV. He arrived in Louisiana and in 1745 married Catherine de Gauvry, moved into her family home and together had 7 children. After his death, Jean Baptiste’s youngest two sons moved in with their elder sister and her sugar plantation owners husband, Etienne DeBore. In 1776 Etienne bought them their own plantation with their inheritance and ten years later, the youngest, Jean Noel married Celeste Robin de Longny. Her father contracted Charles Paquet, a mulatto slave (someone with African and European ancestry) and master builder to construct a French Colonial style house which began in 1787. This would be Destrehan.

Charles Paquet

The plan of the house and the contract

After the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, and like many of the plantations, it moved from growing indigo to sugar, becoming the top sugar producing plantation in the region. As one of the wealthiest and influential plantation owners, Jean Noel was appointed to the Orleans Territorial Council, tasked with creating Louisiana’s government. They take great pride in showcasing the original document signed by Jean Noel, President Thomas Jefferson and Secretary of State James Madison (who would become the fourth US president). It’s kept in a dimmed room below the house in a climate controlled, sealed case. No photos allowed!

Sugar production was also much more labour intensive than indigo, requiring double the manpower. Destrehan’s slave population grew from 49 to 100 with the change to sugar and by 1861, managed over 200 slaves. The dwellings they called home were very much different to the opulence of the manor and several slave dwellings have been relocated from the plantation to the grounds.

These divided cabins would have housed two families with two rooms each. One as a kitchen, sitting room and bedroom and the other, a second bedroom. There was one chimney in the centre with a fireplace in each side and timber shutters covered the windows. Bedding was stuffed with the Spanish moss we’d learned about earlier and while this house displayed an original bed, because the inhabitant was capable of making it, most slaves slept on the floors and they were often dirt, not brick as this depicts.

The list on the wall details the name of every man, woman and child slave on the property, in the hope that their contribution to Louisiana’s history is forgotten.

Our guide regaled us with interesting stories about the house and its inhabitants, including a period tea box complete with a block of tea. No tea bags or even loose leaf tea here! It weighed about 1 lb. or 1/2 kilo and you broke a small piece off to steep in boiling water in a tea pot.

We learned about Marguerite, a slave who was purchased with her two children as the plantation cook and laundress and how formal and tedious the cooking and provision of meals was for the family. As is routine for this era manor, the kitchen was a separate building away from the house. Firstly, to stave off any fires destroying the house and secondly, because it was considered extremely gauche to have cooking smells wafting around the manor. Once cooked, the food was carried to the butlers pantry (a room making a resurgence today to keep the mess from cooking hidden away) in the house and kept warm over coals. Meals were traditionally many courses which only the adults eating at the dining table. The children ate in a separate room next to the butlers pantry and were then whisked away by childminding slaves.

It was Marguerite’s job to tend to the whim’s of the family. She was the chief cook and the one who was present at the dining table. She delivered the food, and cleared the table after each course. That required removing every piece of tableware, cutlery, plates, glasses etc. and removing the top tablecloth to reveal a fresh, crisp tablecloth underneath. Then the table was reset for the next course. There were numerous courses, sometimes, as many as 7 so that’s seven times this ritual was performed for every dinner. The meals were often sumptuous displays of the wealth of the household, including “meat, fish and fowl,” breads, cheese, freshly churned butter and cream, fresh vegetables and fruits picked form the kitchen garden. Imagine completing this task for breakfast, lunch and dinner, seven days a week, sometimes for many extra guests, and having to wash all of these extra table cloths and dishes ready for the following day. Not to mention, preparing and cooking the food in the first place. Marguerite, and her children remained slaves during their lives.

Our guide then took us upstairs to a loft room which shows how the house was built and explained details of its building. It measures 60 ft. x 35 ft. and is surrounded by a 12 ft. balustrade gallery. The house was completed in 1790 with a double-pitched roof and using Louisiana Cypress, which, due to its ability to survive and thrive in swampy conditions, makes it incredibly hard wearing and durable and not subject to the wood rot that infects other timbers. It is one reason why so many of these plantation homes remain in such good condition.

Our tour completed, we were free to wander around the grounds, read the information in the slave dwellings about their lives and enjoy the shade of the 200+ year old oak trees.

I couldn’t resist this little fellow, considering he posed so nicely!

Next up, a trip over the mighty Mississippi river to Laura Plantation and the story of a Louisiana Creole family.

This house and the tour are unique because Laura actually lived in the house and wrote her memoirs in her later life, entitled Memories of the Old Plantation Home & A Creole Family Album and written by Laura Locoul Gore in 1936. Of course, we are relying on her memories of events, written many decades after they occurred, but it still gives a different insight into life at this plantation, especially considering its female biases.

We were on the last tour of the day and again, were the only two, so were able to ask numerous questions. I wondered if we received more candid answers than during the Destrehan tour when we were tacked onto a bus group of about 20 people.

The 12,000 acres which comprised the Laura plantation was amassed by Guillaume Dupare by 1804 and the homestead completed in 11 months. It is raised off the ground on brick columns which created a large underground cellar.

Louisiana Cypress made the structure and it was bricked and plastered inside and stuccoed and painted outside. The house was 24,000 square feet and the separate kitchen another 2,500 ft. The house served as a business headquarters and a venue for large and lavish parties and social gatherings.

Four generations of Locoul’s lived at Laura, who was herself born on the plantation in 1861. But much of her life was spent among various other homes in New Orleans’ French Quarter. In fact, she moved away from the plantation in 1891 when she married Charles Gore, living in his home town St Louis, Missouri. It is because of the manuscript she penned, which wasn’t discovered until 1993, well after her death, that the history of the plantation is so detailed.

After Guillaume’s death in 1808, his wife Nanette Prud’homme ran the manor and the plantation and was the first of four generations of women to manage the plantation. Laura’s grandmother Elizabeth, also outlived her husband and ran the plantation for a further 47 years. She left the property to her son Emile (Laura’s father) and her daughter Aimee. She returned to France having no inclination to run the plantation and Emile renamed it after his daughter Laura. Upon her departure in 1892, it was a condition of the sale that the business remain known as the Laura Plantation.

While we visited the “big house” much of the tour revolved around the slaves and their stories, as remembered by Laura in her memoir.

The four remaining slave cabins are original and were build during the 1840s. By the civil war era, the 1860s, there were 185 slaves that lived and worked on the plantation. When the emancipation was signed in 1866, the majority of slaves remained and continued living in these cabins. Some of their descendants still lived in those cabins until 1977.

The first register of slaves was undertaken in 1808 and there are 17 names on the inventory. Some were born slaves in Louisiana but there are also 5 other African nationalities listed. The inventory provides a name, age if known, skill set and cost of purchase. Historians have pieced together the lives of some of these slaves and in conjunction with Laura’s memoir, their stories are recorded.

Betsey was 29 years old, 5′ 2 1/2″ tall and bought for $550 in 1824. She came from St. Dominigue (now Haiti) and she was a washerwoman, cook and seamstress. It’s assumed her work a a domestic was not suitable because in 1826 she was sold on to his mother-in-law, Nanette Dupare for $600 as only “fit for the field.”

Cyrus Denelin was a “good blacksmith.” Consequently, he was the most expensive slave purchased by the plantation. He was purchased in 1840 at the age of 24 for $2,000. After the civil war, Cyrus started his own successful blacksmith shop and Raymond Locoult was a witness to his marriage.

Sam O’Brien, 23 years old, and 5′ 9″ was sold to Nanette Prudhomme Duparc for $825. he spoke English and struggled on the French-speaking plantation. He escaped but was caught and branded with VDR (referring to his owner) after a poster advertising a $10 reward was published in 1824. He then remained on the plantation and was listed on subsequent inventories in 1829, 1852, 1855 and 1860, but without an occupation. Considering his worth was listed as only $300 in 1852 it is assumed he was a field or menial worker. A plantation journal of 1864 records his death of smallpox.

After three tours around very different plantation homes, we were amassing knowledge of life on the plantation for both the owners and the slaves and it was clear how very different their lives were. Although some slaves were able to manumit from slavery, their lives were manifestly different from the privileged few who owned and lived in the “big houses.”

The last antebellum plantation mansion we visited was Nottoway, an imposing Greek revival/Italian style built for John Hampton Randolph (of THE Randolph’s) in 1859. 

Today, it is a resort venue for weddings, and conferences.  It has 2 restaurants and the bedrooms in the house have had modern ensuites added and are used for accommodation.  There are extensive gardens, beautiful trees, a pool, games room, tennis courts and gym, many utilising the existing buildings.

Our tour was of the main plantation manor and again, we were the only visitors.  The land Nottoway sits on had been a tobacco plantation from 1718 operating with 17 slaves.  John Hampton Randolph arrived in Mississippi in 1820 with his family because his father was appointed as a federal judge by President Monroe.  He married Emily Jane Liddell in 1837 and together they had 11 children.  John realised how lucrative sugar had become, so to increase his wealth, in 1842 he moved his family to Louisiana, bought 1,650 acres of land that would become Nottoway and where cotton had replaced tobacco, replanted sugar cane.  He built a sugar mill in 1844 and tripled his income.  By 1854 he had acquired 7,116 acres of land and managed 176 slaves.  In 1855 he added to his holding with an additional 400 acres of Mississippi river frontage and had the house built, naming it Nottoway after the county in Virginia where he was born.

Similarly to the other manors we’d visited, cypress logs were used extensively throughout the house.  After felling we learned they were cured in the river for 6 years and then dried.  The bricks used were hand made by slaves on the property and 40 carpenters, masons and plumbers were hired.  The house was completed in 1859.  By 1860 they had also built 42 slave cabins, a bathhouse, hospital, schoolhouse, greenhouse, stable and added a steam-powered sugar mill and meeting house which was also used as a creche to mind slaves’ children while they worked.

When the American Civil War began, John’s 3 eldest sons left to fight for the Confederates and as the fighting neared Nottoway, he moved 200 slaves to Texas to grow cotton while his wife and the youngest children remained behind in the hope that this might save it from being ravaged during the war.  His plan worked, because although some of the grounds and buildings were damaged, the manor was spared.  The only damage Nottoway received was a canon ball shot that became embedded in a front pillar and remained there until 1971 when it fell out.

When the war concluded, he returned to Nottoway with most of his slaves who had few other choices for work but by 1875, with sugar cane losing value, he reduced his land holding to 800 acres.  He died at the property in 1883 and his wife Emily, sold the plantation in 1889, dividing the $50,000 received between her 9 remaining children.  She died in Baton Rouge in 1904.  The property then changed hands several times, until the most recent inhabitants, Stanford and Odessa Owen.  They resided in Nottoway from 1949 until he died in 1974.  In 1980 it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places but unable to maintain the extensive house and grounds, Odessa sold the plantation to Arlin Dease with the stipulation that she be able to reside in the house until her death.  When she died in 2003, Dease restored Nottoway then sold it to Australian health care billionaire Paul Ramsay in 1985 for $4.5 million.  It was Ramsay who spent in excess of $15 million converting it into property to the resort destination we see today.

The interior was incredibly opulent with period antique furniture and fittings.  Even the guest bedrooms had the traditional 4 poster beds.

At the conclusion of the hour-long tour, we were able to wander around the grounds at our leisure, and we didn’t see another sole.

Continuing along our roads less travelled, we followed the Mississippi river, arriving at Donaldsonville (there are a lot of towns whose names end in “ville”). Where we had an interesting walk around the town.  We learned that they were Confederates during the war and like many of the small towns we’ve visited, they are proud of their history and their town.

The church was quite beautiful. Founded in 1772, on orders by King Charles III of Spain, the first stones were laid in 1876 but it wasn’t completed for 20 years.

We wandered around the crypts and tombs in the cemetery noting that they, too were all above ground.

We had parked a distance from the main town and walked through the suburbs, new and old to reach the town centre. On the way back I couldn’t resist taking snaps of this interesting domicile.

We guessed this was their security device.

We had one last stop on our journey through Louisiana. Baton Rouge and the state capital building.

As we drove in, we passed one of the 29 locks of the upper Mississippi River, the Port Allen lock. It is the largest free-floating lock of its kind and also one of the busiest.

We drove over the Huey P. Long bridge, opened in 1935 to commemorate the Governor, who was also assassinated in the same year.

We headed for the CBD and the State Capitol Building which is situated among beautiful parklands adjacent the Mississippi River.  They also have the most adorable squirrels and this one posed every so nicely for his photo.

They also have, as we’ve discovered at each of the State Capital buildings we’ve visited, a replica Liberty bell.

The capital building is 137 meters tall with 34 stories. Two separate lifts whisk visitors up 27 floors to an observation deck with 360-degree views of the city.

We were also able to wander around and enjoy the grandeur of the halls of power, so to speak.

Including the Senate chamber that was in session but had broken for lunch.

Our last stop in Louisiana was the historic town of Natchez. Settled by the French in 1716 it is the oldest non-native settled region on the Mississippi River and where we picked up the Natchez Trace Parkway, all the way to Nashville, Tennessee.