Louisiana Plantations

Nottoway Plantation

Our route today had to go around a huge swamp area in Southern Louisiana where there are no roads, eventually reaching the banks of the Mississippi where all the old plantations were cultivated. Our first stop was Nottoway, an ante-bellum mansion built in 1859, just before the Civil War. Nottoway, was named for Nottoway, Virginia where the original owner grew up. It is the largest plantation in Louisiana, 5200 square feet. All the fireplaces were Italian marble and burnt coal. The gas lights were the most surprising element – New York city had just started using gas lights when these were installed. This was a 7000 square acre sugar cane plantation with its own cane mill. From the waste of the sugar cane, they produced gas for use in the house. The house was almost destroyed during the civil war. The Union forces had taken both Baton Rouge and New Orleans and their ships came up the river, firing upon the plantation mansions. One cannonball had shattered a stained window, another had lodged in a wall. But a Union soldier who knew the family, stopped the shelling by surrounding the mansion with soldiers, making it appear that the house was occupied by the Union Army.  Today, the plantation is privately owned. They rent out rooms in the mansion and surrounding buildings for guests, have facilities for weddings, and a restaurant.

Gas Lights

Down river, we came upon Oak Alley plantation, a very different mansion. This mansion was not near as ornate and only consisted of 8 major rooms, the public rooms on the first floor, and bedrooms on the 2^nd. It’s hard to tell how ornate the mansion might have been, because it was abandoned for about a decade and the animals wandered into the first floor, before it was restored. The highlight of the plantation are the 300 year old Live Oaks that lead up to the mansion. Besides the mansion, they have built replica slave quarters, 8 buildings of the original 20. There are also displays about how the civil war affected the mansion and about growing sugar cane in the past and today.

Oak Alley Plantation

Our campground is about 30 miles east of New Orleans, it’s a beautiful campground away from the noise of the highway, but there WiFi is so slow it’s unusable. When we unhooked the trailer, I found that we had bent the bracket holding the stabilizer bars on our hitch. I remembered that we had taken a really sharp U-turn during the day, when we had taken a turn too early and ended up on the wrong highway. That must have been what caused the bent bracket.