Louisiana Plantations (Eastside River Road, Hwy 44 south to the Veterans Bridge, cross to west bank, north on Westside River Road, Hwy 18 to Sunshine Bridge)
Before the advent of the automobile, the rivers and bayous of southern Louisiana were the highways of the day. The land is barely above sea level, rife with swamps and bayous, and thus the rivers were arterials of transportation. Even today, the river is a major transportation route allowing the bounty of the Mid-West to travel its way to the rest of the world. In the early 1800’s sugar was king on the lower Mississippi. North of Baton Rouge up into Mississippi was generally cotton country, but the heat and humidity of the lower river country caused cotton to rot on the bush. The sugar “kings” built fabulous plantation homes along the river, particularly on the stretch between Baton Rouge and New Orleans. The emancipation of slaves during the Civil War essentially ended this lifestyle for most and the cultivation of sugar cane became a corporate activity. Most of the great homes entered a phase of deterioration. The few plantations that survived the turn of the century fell victim to the great sugar crash during the Great Depression. However, a sizeable number of houses were rescued by either historical foundations or families with other sources of wealth and are on display today. Visiting these mansions is not free, generally a fee of $15-$30 is charged and these fees form the basis for today’s maintenance. The humid weather of southern Louisiana is hard on buildings so yearly maintenance needs are substantial. Having said all that, I decided to visit two of the great homes, one on the east side of the river, Houmas House, and one of the west side of the river, Oak Alley. I have to say that as both a history and architecture buff, these were fascinating visits, well worth the fee. Join me as I step back to pre-Civil War Louisiana.
Houmas House
Houmas House is located on the east bank of the Mississippi River about 25 miles southeast of Baton Rouge. In the late 1700’s French settlers built a small house on land previously inhabited by the Houmas Indians. By 1803 the land had passed to a Mr. Donaldson, who built a small cottage directly in front of the original house. A new owner in 1829, General Wade Hampton, connected the two houses with an arched carriageway and enlarged the cottage into the classic mansion seen today for his wife, Mary Cantey Hampton. Remains of the old sugar factory hold the entrance and gift shop. The mansion is not visible from the parking lot behind a wall of lush foliage.
Passing through the gift shop (only way in and out) you enter the lush gardens that surround Houmas House, decorated with classic sculpture and water features.
The path winds around as the west façade of the house comes into view. The house is a classic design, surrounded by a columned veranda on all four sides.
Curving around to the south side I get a full-on view of the front side through the remnants of the original oak alley.
Most “big houses” stood at the end of a double of row of oaks that led from the front door of the house to the river bank. The visual “corridor” continued right through the house with a wide hall that left the house through a center door in the back. The purpose of this configuration was to take advantage of the natural cool breezes that came off the river and funnel them up the cool alley of trees and into the house (remember no central air conditioning in 1829!). However in 1927 the Mississippi River flooded nearly 27,000 square miles of land before it subsided. As a direct result the Army Corps of Engineers essentially “walled in” the lower Mississippi and the massive levees that were constructed wiped out much of the oak alley at Houmas House. Remember that these great houses were built set back directly from the river and thus, between the levee and the construction of River Road (Hwy 44 on this side of the river), much of the front “yard” was lost. Here is the view from the front door looking south to the river (which cannot be seen behind the levee). Houmas House escaped damage during the civil war because the owner was from Ireland, which at the time was part of the British Empire. He hung a large British flag between the two center columns on the second floor and claimed the protection of Great Britain. The ruse worked, both sides in the war left the house untouched.
I’m still heading to the start of the tour and the path curves towards the east side of the house, passing between the historical pet cemetery and the Burnside Oak, largest oak tree on the property and named after one of the early owners.
To my left is the west side of the house (left), directly ahead of me is the garconniere (right). After the age of 14 young single men could no longer live in the main house, only married couples and single daughters lived there. Instead, off to the side a small house was built to house the sons of the family until they were married. Today the garconniere houses a small bar for visitors and cottage guests (one can stay on the property in small cottages out back, in addition to the bar there is an award-winning restaurant housed in the back of the original 1803 building.)
Finally the path approaches the side of the mansion where we wait for our tour to begin. The tour guide is a young man named Michael, a student at nearby LSU in Baton Rouge. He did a great job and was very informative (and, Montanans, he has a cousin who lives in Red Lodge so he knew all about Billings!).
And the tour begins! We are standing near the west porch and Michael points out the water feature made from a kettle designed for the boiling of sugar cane as well as the joining of the late 1700’s house (painted red) and the yellow wall of the 1829 mansion.
The walls of the mansion (as nearly all of the mansions in the area) are built of bricks made from the clay mud of the Mississippi. However, the rich wanted to emulate the great palaces of Europe and so plastered the bricks with stucco made from sea shells and then used a faux painting technique to give the impression of stone.
The walls and ceiling of the entrance hall are covered with murals. The door in the background is the back door leading out to the carriage way. I was surprised at how small the mansions actually are, the appearance of great size is because of the tall columns and the broad veranda on all four sides. Behind glass on the hall wall is an original map of pre-war Louisiana, detailing the plantations along the river. It was discovered in 1992 during an attic renovation, believed to have been in hiding since the Civil War.
There are only four rooms on each floor. Entering the front door, on the left is first the dining room and the ladies sitting room.
Sitting in places of honor on the dining room table are “fly catchers”. The windows and doors of a Louisiana mansion were nearly always kept open in an effort to catch the cool breezes and this, of course, also let in the insect life. These decorative flycatchers were filled with a combination of sugar water and arsenic and placed on the table (covered by decorative doilies so as not to offend the eye). Flies were attracted to the sugar water, crawled in through the bottom and died. A highlight in the ladies sitting room is the gold clock on the mantel. The clock was originally commissioned by Marie Antoinette and adorned a salon at Versailles. Napoleon Bonaparte gave the clock to his brother and over the years it somehow migrated to New Orleans where it was purchased for Houmas House from a pawn shop.
On the other side of the hall are the gentlemen’s sitting room and game room. Note that there are beautiful marble fireplaces throughout the house. Fooled you! The fireplace surrounds are actually faux painted cypress as real marble wasn’t available.
A corner table in the gentlemen’s room is graced by a solid silver figure of Abraham Lincoln (undoubtedly placed there by a post-Civil War owner) weighing 55 pounds and created by the same man who later carved Mt. Rushmore. In the game room the pool table dominates the room but in a corner on a table are a set of original lawn darts with metal points weighing nearly five pounds each. In the round stand are fencing swords.
The main hall ends in the back in the Oval Room, originally rectangular in nature but when modern plumbing and electricity was brought into the house in the 1940’s the room was remodeled into an oval shape so that the utilities leading to the second floor could be hidden in the corners. The main feature of the Oval Room is the spiral staircase leading up to the second floor and a collection of family silver.
At the top of the stairs is a large foyer used as a library and leading to the four bedrooms on the second floor. Note the “Lazy Susan” bookcase with revolving shelves tucked into the curve of the staircase leading to the third floor (which we did not tour).
The four upstairs rooms are two bedrooms (left, right), a nursery (center) and an office. The first bedroom is called the “Bette Davis” room because she stayed in it while filming the movie “Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte” in the home.
The office occupies the fourth room on the second floor.
The travelling liquor case on the desk actually belonged to Confederate General Stonewall Jackson. A curious piece of furniture is hiding behind the original Tiffany lamp. It’s a reading chair from the 1850’s. Gentlemen would straddle the chair and face the reading stand to read, ladies would sit with their back to the reading stand and turn to the side, utilizing the arm as their book rest.
Still on the second floor but crossing over the arched carriageway into the second floor of the original house we enter a room now used as a dining room for the on-site restaurant. The room has the original cypress timber ceiling from the late 1700’s. The plaster was removed on part of the wall to expose the original brick when gas was installed in the building in the late 1800’s (the vertical line in the brick on either side are old channels for gas pipes).
On the ground floor of the 1700’s building is the kitchen area, furnished with period utensils. The open hearth would have been the original cooking station, the cast iron stove in the corner was added in the mid-1800’s.
The formal tour ends back in the covered carriage way where the 1790’s house (left) meets the 1829 mansion (right).
Leaving the house and making my way back to the exit (at the gift shop, of course) I again pass through more of the magnificent gardens.
The other house that I drove by on Hwy 44 before crossing the Veterans Bridge to the west side of the river is San Francisco, designed in the French Creole style rather than the classic architecture of Houmas House. Completely surrounded by a massive oil refinery the house sits right on the highway and levee. I didn’t tour this house because they wanted to charge $17 and would not allow any pictures of the interior. That conversation took place inside the entry way of the house where it was clear that the level of restoration didn’t begin to come close to Houmas House so I took shots of the front (left) and back (right) and moved on!
After checking out San Francisco, I head up and over the Veterans Bridge and turn west on Hwy 18, the river road on the west side of the Mississippi River.
The West Side River Road (Hwy 18 north from the Veteran’s Bridge to the Sunshine Bridge)
After crossing the Mississippi River on the Veterans Bridge, we head up on the west river road, Hwy 18. Here there are multiple plantations to choose to visit but I’m only going to stop at one (arguably the most famous and highly recommended). Drive-bys included Evergreen and St. Joseph.
This is still sugar cane country and vast stretches of cane sweep to the horizon. Harvest is in process and giant machines clip and grind the sugarcane for transport to factories. These are no longer private plantations, of course, but giant corporate operations. There are not as many giant petro-chemical plants or docking facilities on this side of the river, but every now and then spears of industry pierce the sky.
We glide around a curve in the road and there is our destination, fabled Oak Alley.
Oak Alley
The origins of Oak Alley are shrouded in the mists of time. What is clear is that sometime in the early 1700’s an unknown Frenchmen planted two parallel rows of fourteen oak trees each approximately 80 feet apart leading a quarter mile from the banks of the Mississippi to the highest spot in the entire parish, a rise that is only 10 feet above sea level (this is FLAT country!) Even during the Great Flood of 1927 water did not reach into the big house. The highway and levee are nearly a quarter mile away at the end of the alley of oaks. The trees were already mature when French missionaries arrived in the area in 1722. Oak trees typically live about 600 years so these are only middle-aged. Welcome to Oak Alley.
The ticket office and entry to the grounds are in an original guest house on the estate. The mansion had been abandoned after the Civil War until Jefferson Davis Hardin purchased the plantation in 1917 and began a restoration. At that time the guest house had bars on the window, leading to speculation that at one time it must have served as the plantation jail. Hardin ran out of money but did replace the roof of the main house, preventing further deterioration. Josephine and Andrew Stewart purchased the estate in 1925 and completed the restoration as seen today. The Stewarts lived in the house until their deaths (Andrew-1946, Josephine-1972).
When Jacque Roman acquired the plantation in 1836, his purchase included 57 field slaves and he added another 49 that year for a total of 106. He built the big house in 1837 as a gift to his wife Celina. The slave quarters are somewhat unique in that they are closer to the big house than on most plantations.
Slaves were housed in “doubles”, two rooms to a building, each side housing a group of slaves on either side of a double faced fireplace. The house slaves lived in the quarters closest to the big house and had somewhat better furnishings (left) than field slaves (right). Buildings where “white-washed”, painted with a mixture of lime and water to give the appearance of cleanliness.
A “sick house” is included in slave row. Slaves were quite valuable and the plantation had a “doctor” who treated both the residents of the big house as well as the slaves. One of the doubles was devoted to medical care with the doctor’s office on the left and the sickroom on the right.
The front of the slave quarters face the central walk of the plantation. This picture is looking north up the Back Alley (oaks were planted behind the big house in later years to mimic the famed front alley).
Life on Oak Alley was not a romantic adventure, the profitability of the plantation was based upon the work of slaves. Displays inside some of the cabins elaborate on a slave’s life on the plantation. When Jacque died in 1848 all of his property was inventoried. A list of his slaves and their market value was included.
The end of the Civil War did not end slavery as neatly as most believe.
Turning south we walk up the back alley to the big house, past a giant kettle used in the processing of sugar cane turned fountain.
Emerging from the back oak alley the back door to the mansion awaits across a small grassy plaza. As is typical of a classically designed plantation house all four sides look somewhat the same. This is where we gather for the house tour.
We are walked around to the front and enter through the front door, where a guide greets the group and sends us into the front parlor on the right where our guide, Sarah, gives a historical orientation to the plantation.
Like most of the great plantation houses, the mansion was essentially abandoned after the Civil War as big businesses took over the work of growing and processing the sugar cane and there was no use for the old houses. Oak Alley was “rescued” by a wealthy family, the Stewarts, in the 1920’s and the family lived in the house until “Miss Josephine” died in 1972. She created a foundation in her will to protect and maintain the plantation “as a historical monument to the times and area in which the property was built.” The parlor (and rest of the public rooms) is furnished with items that, although not necessarily original to Oak Alley, are original to the period the house was built (1837.)
Across the hall is the dining room, set with the family china and sporting the doily-covered “fly catchers” under a fan which would have been operated by a young slave standing in the far corner. The slave had to practice pulling the rope that moved the fan because he had to move it fast enough to create a cool breeze but not so fast as to blow out the candles on the table.
The other two rooms on the main floor are being used by the foundation as offices and are not part of the tour. Upstairs are the bedrooms.
Stepping out on the second floor veranda there are great views of the grounds around the big house.
Sitting at the southeast corner of the big house is the plantation bell which was the communication system for governing life on the plantation. Different rings would tell the slaves when to go to the fields, when to break for meals, when to end the work day, and, of course, notify the plantation of emergencies. Oak Alley’s bell was cast in 1848 by A. Fulton Bell & Brass Founder in Pittsburgh and is still used today to signify the start of house tours.
You may have noticed that there was no kitchen included in the tour. For both safety’s sake as well as keeping the heat out of the main house, the kitchen would have been housed in a separate building which no longer exists.
Both Houmas House and Oak Alley have been fascinating examples of “glamorous” side plantation life during the pre-Civil War era. While Oak Alley gives a nod to the role that slavery played in the support of this lifestyle for a very few elite, neither really exposes the raw brutality of the economic system that allowed these big houses to be built and created the racial tensions that still simmer under the surface today. Just really interesting…
Next up: The Big Easy
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