Around New Orleans

Yesterday we went with Jim and Goody to tour Oak Alley Plantation, about 45 miles up river from New Orleans. You can see how the plantation got its name. Interestingly, these oaks were about 50 years old when they were dug up and transplanted to form the allee.

You can do that sort of thing when you have 220 enslaved people at your bidding. There are six of the twenty slave cabins left at the plantation. You can see some of them at the edges of this photo. In the distance is the back of the “big house”.

220 people lived in 20 cabins to support the five members of the Jacques Roman family, a creole family who lived in the big house. This was a sugar plantation so the work for the field hands was brutal.

While we were waiting for our tour of the mansion Goody and I walked up the allee for photos of the front of the house. That’s Goody taking her picture.

This is my picture. That’s Jim in front of the door and Bud is in the red cap just to the left of the pillar.

We weren’t allowed to take pictures inside the house, but I took one of the second floor gallery.

From the second floor you can almost see the levee and the Mississippi River at the far end of the allee. The plantation was 1100 acres, but it was fairly narrow and deep. Every plantation fronted the river as that was the main transportation for people and goods.

To either side they have recreated gardens.

One of these would have been a kitchen garden The slaves had their own gardens and at night, after they had done their days work, they would work in those. They grew and sold corn to the Roman family so they could buy chickens and pigs to supplement their diets along with the vegetables they could grow. Fortunately the Romans left detailed records so we know quite a lot about their lives.

This beautiful magnolia tree is only about a hundred years old and was planted long past the time of the Romans. Jacques built the big house when the plantation was earning good money in 1839. Unfortunately, he died young of tuberculosis. His son, Henri, was only nine. The plantation fell into arrears under overseers as Jacques’ wife Celine had no interest in the business. Ten years later Henri came back after graduating from college and tried to get the business going. That was 1860. In 1861 the civil war started. In 1863 came the end of the war and the emancipation of the slaves. As our tour guide put it, the enslaved people could now leave if they chose, and they left. Henri did not have the resources to keep the place going. So this beautiful mansion was an operational plantation for only 22 years. After that it went through a lot of owners, fortunately the last one had plenty of money to renovate and modernize the house and then set it up as a museum for us to share.

After our beautiful and informative tour we all came back to the trailer and Bud made a tasty lunch of fish tacos, using up the last of the whitefish he bought in northern Michigan. Jim and Goody left in the afternoon for one last night in the Big Easy and then home to Florida.

It was hard to see Jim and Goody go but we distracted ourselves today with a round of disc golf.

The course we found was gorgeous and challenging.

And it had armadillos, so Matey was rewarded for the two days he spent waiting for us while we toured. (The armadillo is in the grass, you can see its tail sticking out.)

Matey, at least, was happy to have things back to “normal”.