Hundreds of New Orleans plantations used to line the Mississippi River throughout Louisiana. Now there are few, mostly preserved as historical landmarks and educational centers, lest we forget our grim but important past.
New Orleans, overall, is a place that keeps the past close. History is so intertwined with every day that it’s often like walking around a historical re-enactment site.
I grew up in Detroit, where we have the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village. There, Ford reconstructed an entire historic town made of homes and buildings related to famous people, places and events. He transported the buildings from around the country and, once the town was established, hired actors to perform in character year-round, and they still do.
In Greenfield Village, you can see Thomas Edison’s laboratory, Noah Webster’s house, and the Wright Brothers’ bike shop. It’s like walking into a fabulous time loop. As kids, you could attend for a whole school day and do all your schoolwork on small slate boards. It was different. New Orleans is sort of like that, except there are no paid actors; these characters are just part of the fabulous fabric of the Crescent City.
There are several plantation houses within about an hour’s drive from the city, and a few offer tours of the homes and grounds. I never pass up an opportunity to explore beautiful architecture and history, so off I went.
New Orleans Plantations
In this area of Louisiana, there used to be over 400 New Orleans plantations. On old maps, you can see thin strips of land containing sugar cane farms owned and run by individual families. Some, with more acreage, prosperity, or better management than others, survived. The most enduring remain as historical sites now open for tours and storytelling. The land of some, sold to corporations, still operates farms.
As you tour these homes, the guides, décor and displays attempt to give you a sense of what life was like on the plantation and as a way of life in those times. There is a lot of beauty in the “simpler” times, for sure, but it also brings home the horrors of slavery in a way that nothing else can do. It is a perspective-shifting experience for anyone.
And the New Orleans sugar plantations were said to be among the worst of all – as sugar cane was the hardest to work and the environment the harshest. It was usually an added punishment for any enslaved person to end up in New Orleans. In the past, when tours first started, the plantation guides didn’t always talk about slavery, but now, thankfully, they do.
Oak Alley Plantation
Oak Alley is the most visually spectacular plantation in the area and has the most amenities; therefore, it’s the most popular of the New Orleans plantations. It sits, as do all plantations here, along the Mississippi River. Their positions are due to the heartiness of the land there and because the river was the primary source of transportation before automobiles. It also provided a much-needed cool breeze in the hot Louisiana summer.
I’ve been to Oak Alley three times, and I never bore of the spectacular view it provides when you stand on top of the levee and look back at the vast, two-story home with its ornate white columns surrounding it. The house, for me, isn’t the best part, though – it’s the trees. Oak Alley sits at the end of two columns of massive live Oak trees that form a canopy from the river to the house – hence the name Oak Alley.
This type of tree landscaping on plantation property isn’t uncommon in the south, but they’re always a sight to behold. The way the 28 live oaks line the walkway from the Mississippi River to the front of the house, forming a tunnel, is surreal – and these are the most photogenic collection of trees in the New Orleans area.
Inside the Big House
It costs $25 to receive a house tour and access to the plantation grounds and former enslaved people’s cabins.
Inside the “Big House,” a guide takes you through the house to see the antique furniture and rooms set up as they would have been during its occupation. As with most houses of this period, the layout of rooms is stacked above and below with floor-to-ceiling windows for a breeze in the summer and a fireplace in the winter. This house, like others of the same era, used one side for entertaining and filled it with their best furniture, paintings, and accessories, while the other side of the house held the bedrooms and living quarters. There are no bathrooms, closets, or kitchens. Cooking was done in an outbuilding and brought to the dining room when ready. Without plumbing, the residents required a trek to outhouses. These people may have been rich, but life was not easy.
Hard Life in Tough Times
Back then, screens didn’t exist, and I can’t imagine the difficulty of open windows in this swampy land. You can imagine the bugs, and it’s no wonder so many died of Yellow Fever. That, combined with the ridiculous amount of clothes people wore back then, is just mind-boggling.
Outside you can follow the signage and trails on a self-guided tour of the property and slave quarters. The displays feature old slave cabins showing their meager living conditions and have historical documentation of the people who lived there as enslaved laborers. The sales documentation is especially telling and sad. They show how “comparable slaves” were priced differently based on their likelihood of running away. It raised so many questions in my mind, many answered on the tour, and others never to be understood.
What to Do at the Plantation
This is a plantation you can spend an entire day – or even several days exploring by visiting the restaurant, bar, and overnight cabins.
- Oak Alley Restaurant is in a 19th-century cottage near the historical grounds, serving traditional Cajun and Creole dishes – I’ve never eaten here, but I’ve heard it’s great.
- The “Spirits” Bar offers southern drinks like the mint julip, Sazerac, hurricanes, and local brews. You can enjoy your drink on the back porch overlooking the grounds just like you might have a few hundred years ago. You must have a mint julip while in the south.
- The Oak Alley Plantation Inn has one and two-bedroom cabins off to the side of the property, starting at $175 a night.
The Laura Plantation
The Laura Plantation is a Creole-style house painted maroon, green, and yellow, making it stand out dramatically from other houses around it. It’s right down the road from Oak Alley, so visiting both on the same day is easy and recommended.
A guide takes visitors to the front of the house and talks about the history of the buildings, the family that owned the home and the general ways of sugar plantations in the south. The trees out front catch breezes, and the branches blow as you walk through an old herb garden.
The famously colorful house had been painted white at one time to hide their Creole roots – because Louisiana was banning French and trying hard to Americanize everything, so at that time, they painted the house white to blend in. Preservationists have since peeled back the layers of white paint and brought back the old colors on Laura Plantation, once again allowing it to stand out.
Life on the Plantation
Inside the house, a guide takes you from room to room. Each room opens into the next and the next with a porch wrapping around outside on upper and lower levels. The kitchen is outside, and there was no bathroom.
The rooms in this plantation are ornate but not overly so. Plantations, first and foremost, were farms. The owners’ homes in the city would have been much lusher. Many “farmers” may have owned several plantations and city homes, plus summer homes near the water. I say homes, but I mean mansions.
The Documents of Enslavement
In the back of the property, like at Oak Alley, there are old slave quarters and documents outlining the buying, selling and pricing of humans. That these cabins exist at all is amazing since most were destroyed. Luckily, some still survive.
The enslaved person’s cabins in the back were much smaller and sparser in contrast to the big house that it brought a noticeable pall over the group. It’s hard to witness, but we must.
Once slavery was abolished, there were few ways for once-enslaved people to earn a living. Many enslavers hired them, charged them rent, and paid them with certificates they could only use at their own plantation store. So any chance of them taking advantage of their freedom was low.
New Orleans Plantation Region
Eventually, unable to maintain their crops and make a profit, plantation owners sold the land. Later big corporations took over the growing and processing of crops instead of individual families. But now, much of our agriculture comes from other places.
The New Orleans region used to have over 400 hundred plantations along the Mississippi River, but now there are fewer than a dozen. Almost none are still functional. Suburbs and corporate farms replaced them.
There is so much more to learn about plantations but visiting a few of them is a good way to start. These two are excellent. The gift shops sell many books about the lives of these families and the plantations up to the current day.
You can take a guided tour of the Laura Plantation and grounds for $25. Unlike the Oak Alley Plantation, you’re not allowed to walk around unguided, but the tour is detailed.
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