New Orleans - Day 4 - Plantation Tour

On the tour bus going over the Mississippi River.

Evergreen Plantation, near Wallace, Louisiana.

The main house was constructed mostly in 1832 and the plantation's historical crop was sugar cane. It was an operating plantation up until about 1930.

Laura Plantation is a historic plantation in St. James Parish, Louisiana on the West Bank of the Mississippi River near Vacherie, Louisiana.

It is significant for its early 19th c. Créole-style raised big house and several surviving outbuildings, including six slave quarters. It is one of only 15 plantation complexes in Louisiana with this degree of complete structures.

Pots for cooking the sugar cane.

Originally known as DuParc, the plantation was established in 1755. The current plantation house was built in 1805 by a French Créole family.

You can tell this plantation is Creole because of the bright colors. American houses were white.

The basement of the big house.

There are ZERO nails in this cypress house. It is held together by cypress pins. The number next to the pin corresponds to a number on a beam in the house above.

The garden.

I forget who these folks are...

Looking north toward River Road and the Mississippi.

The owner and our tour guide, Norman Marmillion, stands next to a huge well. We were so lucky to get him for our tour!

The Creole's recycling program for wine bottles...

Slave quarters.

Alcée Fortier, who later became Professor of Romance Languages and folklore at Tulane University, was said to have collected Louisiana Creole versions of the West African Br'er Rabbit stories here in the 1870s.

The Br'er Rabbit and Br'er Fox tales are variations on stories that originated in Senegal and were brought to America around the 1720s by enslaved Africans. According to the plantation's history, Alcée Fortier, a neighbor of the family and student of folklore, came there in the 1870s to listen to the freedmen. He collected the stories which freedmen told their children in Louisiana Créole. These stories were about Compair Lapin and Compair Bouki (the clever rabbit and stupid fool), in which the rabbit plays a trickster role. Twenty-five years later in 1894, Fortier published stories which he had collected and translated in the edition Louisiana Folk Tales: In French Dialect and English Translation. Fortier did publish such a book and may have collected the tales at Laura and his own family's plantation.

Oak Alley Plantation is a historic plantation located on the Mississippi River in the town of Vacherie, Louisiana, United States of America. It is protected as a National Historic Landmark.

It is named after its distinguishing feature, an alley of a double row of live oaks about 240-meter long, which was planted in the early 18th century, long before the present house was built. The alley leads towards the Mississippi River.

The Mighty Mississippi from the top of a levee

Historic Felicity Plantation was the setting for the movie "The Skeleton Key".

The plantation is located on the Mississippi River in Saint James Parish, Louisiana, not the coastal, swampy Terrebonne Parish depicted in the movie. At the end of the movie, the aerial shot of the house and its grounds was actually done with CGI technology. In that shot, the house and the grove of trees surrounding it are real, but the swamp that seems to be on the verge of engulfing the house was created by the director for the movie. Behind the house actually lie hundreds of acres of fields. In reality, the house is not really run down; it was decorated with ivy, among other things, to set the tone.

I believe the boarded windows are thanks to Hurricane Gustav.