Back to plantation alley

Our last week in Bay St. Louis we made another trip into Louisiana to see two more of the many plantations along the Mississippi.  First stop was Oak Alley.

Built in the 1830s, Oak Alley takes its name from an avenue of 250 year-old live oak trees leading from the house to the river.  One of the plantation's mysteries is who planted the avenue, which predates the house by about a hundred years, and why.  By the way, live oaks, the most magnificent trees in the South, have a life-span of about 500 years, which makes these trees middle-aged.

View from the second floor gallery down the allee of oaks to the river levee

Second floor gallery at front of house

Side and rear facades of house

Joey dwarfed by one of the oaks in the allee

After lunch we visited nearby Laura plantation.

Like Oak Alley, Laura was a sugar plantation with owners who had their town homes in New Orleans.  As with French settlement along the St. Laurence, and even in the Windsor area of southwestern Ontario, plantations along the Mississippi were laid out in long, narrow lots.  Laura plantation originally extended 18 miles back from the river!

Laura bills itself as a "Creole plantation."  Its main house was completed in 1805 and we learned that, in contrast to "American," Anglo-Saxon houses, which, like Oak Alley, were usually painted white or soft colours, Creole houses were traditionally painted in more vivid hues.  Inside too the woodwork is colourful.

Creole, in case you're wondering, usually denotes cultural, not racial, origin and came to be applied to anyone from Louisiana who was born there.  Most of the old Creole families in fact had white, black and even aboriginal forbears.  Apparently, in contrast to British North America, many of the early European (French and Spanish) immigrants to Louisiana were single men arriving without families, and commingling with slaves, free blacks and native peoples was more common (we see this in New France too).  Before the "Americanization" of Louisiana in the years before the Civil War, it was also not particularly unusual for a plantation community to include the acknowledged illegitimate children of male members of the planter family and slave women.

A restored slave cabin at Laura Planation

The as-yet-unrestored overseer's house at Laura plantation

One of the most interesting things about Creole, as opposed to British/American, plantation culture was the position of women.  Thanks to the French Revolution (remember that Louisiana was a French colony until 1803), there was greater equality of the sexes, women could own property and there was no presumption that the oldest son would take over; rather the job went to the person who was considered the smartest and had the most business sense (since these plantations were above all businesses) -- at Laura these were usually women!  The plantation in fact takes its name from Laura Duparc, the last member of the founding family to own the plantation and whose memoirs of life there have been a huge asset to its interpretation.