We had a busy day today as we are heading into the plantation zone, we left a little earlier than we usually do and by driving over the bridge we had left Mississippi and entered Louisiana. After a quick stop at Walmart to pick up lunch we were on our way. The first stop should have been at Frogmore Plantation which we could see from the side of the road but unfortunately wasn’t open today so we continued to Kent Plantation. This is the oldest standing structure in central Louisiana, the original six room house was completed in 1800. Built by French settler Pierre Baillio II on land from the 1784 land grant. The building was brick made from clay and Spanish moss. The living quarters are just the first floor as this area is prone to flooding, although the barns and slave quarters were not raised so presumably just flooded. However the guide did say that the house was unusually tall and it is said this was because Pierre and his wife went on a trip and told the slaves to make bricks while they were gone for their new house when they returned. I am not sure if they were way longer than expected or if the slaves were very efficient but they had made so many by the time they returned that the house was built on very high stilts. We had to join a tour to see the buildings but again we were the only ones so we had a private tour which started in the house. This was originally a four room house with a ‘strangers’ room on the back, we finally found out why all the rooms just lead into each other, it is because they used to have to pay tax on the number of rooms they had and a hall way would be classed as another room, this is also the reason that they had back to back fireplaces as they had to pay tax on these also, apparently this tax went to pay the street lighters of New Orleans, but if they only had one chimney and the back wasn’t blocked off then it only counted as one fireplace. The plantation houses were very nice but quite a lot smaller as they were functional rather than grand for entertaining, this house was only one room wide but had a balcony both sides so that you could open the windows and let the breeze through when there was one. the second owners built a couple of rooms on the end as extra bedrooms, but there was also a strangers room as it took 3-4 months for the news papers to get to this part of the country so if you had a spare room you would put a candle in the window which said that you would allow them to stay in return for information or ‘news’ these rooms were on the same floor as the house but you entered up the back staircase and the only way you could get into the house was through the main door into the dining room. A stranger would be shown to the room by the man of the house who would then talk to the person for a while and hear some of the news, they would then be brought in to meet the family and they would tell them all the news they had. From the house we went down into the Kitchen which was the closest building to the house, then we went into the slave quarters. These didn’t seem particularly cramped or perhaps we have heard so much about how they were mistreated we expected something like a dog cage! The houses we saw would house two families. Apparently slaves from this area mostly came from the Caribbean because if they survived the crossing and working in the Caribbean then they were strong and not likely to be sickly so they fetched a good price! After the import of slaves was banned they were encouraged to start families as this would provide the next generation of workers, the guide said she had actually seen a document from one of the plantation owners wives where it said she had just brought 15 females and hoped this would provide her with a new crop of slaves in the next year. They had a few other buildings including a barn and finally a Sugar Mill. According to the guide they could grow sugar in Louisiana but didn’t know what to do with it, it was only later when someone published a book that they understood the process of refining it into Molasses we talked through the process which seems to have been quite high risk then it was time to move on to our next location which was Magnolia Plantation. This is in the Cane River area and was established in 1835 by Ambrose LeComteII and his wife Julia. However the early history is rooted in mid-1799s colonial Louisiana. In 1753 Jean Baptist’s Le Comte I received a land grant on both sides of the Cane River laying the foundation for a cotton plantation in the region. By 1860 Ambrose II owned multiple properties of over 5,000 acres. Cotton and other crops were cultivated and harvested by 275 enslaved people housed in 70 cabins. As many as 25 of the Magnolia Plantation cabins were two room brick structures accommodating a family or group in each of the two rooms. Eight of these cabins have survived. Two of their daughters married into the Hertzog family, more of them later and Ambrose gave part of Magnolia to his daughter Ayala and son-in-law Matthew Hertzog in 1852 and they started managing the plantations. The Civil War had devastating effects for the plantation and the families, many of them were killed or wounded in the conflict. After emancipation some of the former enslaved workers became share croppers and the plantation started again although never on the same scale, mechanisation and WWII brought the end of plantation agriculture at Magnolia. We walked round the grounds which included the Plantation Store, all plantations had stores which served workers who remained at the plantation after the Civil War, one of the ways the plantation owners cut their costs after the war when they had to pay their former slaves was to pay them with their own currency that could only be used in the their store so whereas before the Civil war they provided ‘housing’ and ‘fed’ the slaves, after the war they paid them a wage from which they had to pay rent for the housing and buy provisions to eat! There was a blacksmith as every plantation needed one, a Pigeonaire for Pigeons which they would eat as a delicacy, the Overseer’s house which also was identified as a ‘hospital’ on one of the maps from 1858. Large plantations often required ill or injured enslaved workers to report to a hospital or sick house which was also known as the Oversee’r house as it served as a home for plantation managers. We walked past the slave cabins to the Cotton Gin / Pressing Barn, this contained a cotton ‘gin’ and pressing machine from the 1830s which was still used until 1939. ‘Gin’ was short for engine, the engine actually drove the bottom combs that extracted the seeds and other debris. The wood screw press was mule powered, it is thought to be the only one still in its original location. After the Cotton was ginned or de-seeded it was pressed into 500 pound bales for the market. Cotton was last ginned at Magnolia in 1939 and they only stopped because the steam converter was destroyed by a tornado! We sat and ate our rather late lunch in the car park of Magnolia then went round to Melrose which again you can only go in by tour and as luck would have it one was just starting when we arrived. We started in the house which again was originally only the first floor but was later filled in. It was built in 1796 by Louis Metoyer, one of 10 Franco-African children of slave Marie Therese CoinCoin and Claude Thomas Pierre Metoyer who was a merchant at Fort St Jean Baptist’s. They never married but were together for 19 years but because the slaves laws said that slavery transferred through the mother all of their children were considered slaves. Claude purchased her freedom and that of some of her children. I am not sure what happened to him but he gave her a parcel of land and a yearly allowance so she started raising tobacco, cattle and harvested bear grease! Her fortunes grew by virtue of her and her sons receiving land grants and purchasing slaves which I still can’t quite understand but they did become the leading family of a community called Isle Brevelle populated by “gens de couleur libre” free people of colour who thrived as business people, plantation owners and slave owners. In 1796 Louis was deeded 911 acres of land on which he built Melrose Plantation, he constructed the Big House in 1832 but died before it was completed, his son Theophile Louis finished the construction. In 1847 Theophile lost almost everything he owned, the plantation that was valued at $100,000 when his father died was sold to Henry Hertzog for $8,340. The Hertzog family owned this and Magnolia and farmed them jointly making both plantations profitable. Fanny Hertzog began living in the house and turned the two room raised cottage into a large plantation home by closing in the upper gallery and above ground cellar which quadrupled the size of the house. The family quite literally witnessed the ravages of war during the Red River Campaign of 1863 and 1864 when both the Confederate and union armies advanced, retreated, battled and stripped land of useable goods. When Joseph passed away in 1899 his son and daughter-in-law John Hampton Henry and Cammie Garret Henry brought the property from their heirs and were responsible for a lot of the renovation, Cammie lived there until her death in the 1970s. After looking round the house we walked around the grounds which had the Africa house (nothing to do with Africa!) the Yucca house (nothing to do with the plant) a blacksmiths, plantation store, and finally Clemmi’s house. Clementine Hunter was a slave and one-time Melrose cook who emerged to become a celebrated African American Artist! An exhibition of her work was in the Africa house and to be honest was a bit lost on me! After this we headed to our hotel for the next two nights, we are actually staying in a B&B called Samuel Guy House which was actually a working plantation house built in 1850 in Mansfield but moved to its current location. It is very impressive and it turns out we are the only people staying here tonight so we have the run of the house as the manager doesn’t live on site so after unloading the car we wandered round the house to check out the other rooms then despite the fact we have a lounge and bedroom we went and sat in the conservatory and had a few drinks updated the website and generally pretended we were rich plantation owners without the slaves!
