After a very nice breakfast we decided to head out to Oakland Plantation which had been closed when we came by yesterday. The original plantation was founded in 1785 on a Spanish land grant by Jean Pierre Emanuel Prud’homme. He had a few slaves and grew tobacco and indigo. After the invention of the cotton gin he changed the main crop to cotton and increased his enslaved workforce to around 150 by the time of the civil war. Most of the housing was in one room cabins which were converted into tenant housing after Emancipation. We started by walking round the grounds where there is a Mule Barn, Carpenter’s shop and a couple of Pigeonnier’s and made our way to the Store and Post office which was opened after the Civil War for sharecroppers, tenant farmers and locals to buy supplies. The post office continued operating in this store until 1967 but the general store didn’t close until the early 1980s. From here we walked to the Doctor’s Cottage which was the home to young couples of every generation of the Prud’hommes family. After the Civil War it was rented to Dr James Leveque whose daughter married into the Prud’homme family. Just down from the Doctors house is a Jug Cistern that collected rain water from the roof of the Corn Crib, only the top is visible but it is said to hold 5000 gallons of water, this is near to the overseer’s house which was built in 1860 and was still in use in the 1960s we finally reached the Slave / Tenant Cabins. There were only a couple of these which are all that remain from the larger community. We walked back to the general store as this is where the tour of the Main house starts. You can only go into the house on a guided tour and the tour only runs twice a day so we had timed it quite well. The house was built as a four room Creole cottage in 1821 by enslaved workers, it was later extended to provide a hall way and two additional rooms, they also moved some of the internal walls to create space for things like wardrobes and an internal kitchen as the house was lived in until the 1970’s when the land was sold to the park services. Some of the ground floor had what looked like large wood shutters, this was because the ground floor was used for storage and for the slaves to move form one part of the house to another. I had wondered how this worked and it turns out that in this house they had a couple of trap doors that meant that the enslaved person could be sent for something which was stored below and they wouldn’t have to walk through the house to get it, they could go down through the trap door, collect what was needed and either come up through the same door of if required another one. None of the slaves lived in the house with the exception of the Nanny, she had a brick room under the house with a single window and a trap door directly into the children’s closet l am not sure how they could class this as in the house but they do. They don’t know how many enslaved people stayed at the plantation after the Civil War, although letters form the owner suggest the majority did, unlike one of the plantations further down the river where at the end of the war as the Union Army marched out of the south they joined the procession and just kept on going to freedom. After the tour had finished we looked around some of the outbuildings associated with the main house such as the laundry, poultry shed as well as a Tractor Shed. Once we had finished looking around we drove back towards town and went to look at Fort St Jean Baptiste. Natchitoches was actually founded in 1714 by a French Canadian who was on his way from Mobile to Mexico, he left a small detachment in two huts to guard the stores and trade with the inhabitants, this was the first permanent settlement. In 1716 a small company of colonial groups were sent to build a garrison to prevent the Spanish from advancing across French Louisiana. The fort continued to serve as a military outpost and commercial trade centre until 1762 when France’s defeat by England in the French and Indian War forced them to cede the colony to Spain. The fort served as a trade centre for some time, but since its original purpose of protecting a territorial boundary no longer existed the fort was eventually abandoned and by 1803 it was no longer usable. Today they have built a replica of the fort, accurate in every detail including the building methods used and unlike everywhere else absolutely no air conditioning! We walked to the replica fort and went in each of the rooms where they have faithfully built the fort to the original plan. It is actually a really nice representation as it shows you how small it was, possibly because most people lived outside the fort and in town, but all the same it would have been fully occupied if there had been any trouble. This is not far from where we are staying so we went and dropped the car off then went for a walk around the Historic District. The district still has quite a few of the original houses, interestingly we walked past the ‘Town’ house for the Preud’homme family which unlike the very functional and quite small plantation house looks more like the Antebellum houses we have seen elsewhere, it will be interesting to see if Natchitoches just builds small very basic plantation houses or if that is what they are all like. We had lunch in town and completed the walk by walking through the American Cemetery which actually backs onto where we are staying. The person that owns this house is actually responsible for the cemetery being looked after. It is one of the oldest European cemeteries in the Louisiana Purchase. It began as a burial ground for the French colonists. It has always been an integrated cemetery, people of Native American, European and African decent have all been buried here. The oldest marked grave is from 1787 but the cemetery may have been used as early as 1744 and it is still used today. By the time we had finished our walk we needed a rest so we came back into the house and relaxed in the conservatory while we recovered and cooled down.
