The Great River Road
My next Harvest Host opportunity, the Houmas House, is one of the historical preserved plantation properties along the River Road. in Louisiana. The drive is spectacular. I’ve visited one other plantation on a trip through a few years ago. This mansion house is more elegant and the grounds are magnificent complete with massive live oaks, ponds with swans both black and white, and so many statues you could never see them all.
The River Road Museum is also on the property. So much information there I think I would have to revisit many times to absorb it all.
Just three of us on the tour, besides our guide. Two black men and me. The two guys were extremely well educated about a lot of local stuff and local history about which I was clueless. They simply asked intelligent questions, marveled at the beautiful things, expressed amazement at the gadgetry. The mansion’s slave-riddled past didn’t seem to affect their appreciation of the history. I’ve come to think that even the word “plantation” is dirty now. But it is history—and there is no denying the beauty of the place. I felt better about enjoying it because of my company. Don’t judge me.
There is a story about the owner of this property during the civil war era, John Burnside. Supposedly he offered his slaves freedom, offering the ones who stayed to help work the land their own deeded property and payment for their labor. I don’t know if the story is true. What I find online is that this plantation was the largest slave-holding enterprise in the area, with 800 enslaved people. A more likely story is that the slaves were freed by the civil war and the plantation shifted to a sharecropper format. Check out this article in the Deseret News Raising Cane
We have a similar b.s. story in my slave-owning ancestry. (Sorry.) My mother’s father’s people owned a farm with slaves in Alabama. We have this family legend about how our greatX4 granddaddy offered freedom to the slaves on his farm (surely he had to do so after the war.) In our legend, as told to me by my grandmother who would have been told by her husband, who would have been told by his parents… who would have in turn be told by their parents… only one eighteen year old young man took him up on it and the rest chose to stay. We are meant to understand that this was because my family were benevolent “employers” and the slaves were so happy at that farm. More likely there would be absolutely nowhere for them to go and no way for them to survive—even if the story is even partly true. Everyone who has ties to our shameful slave-owning past seems to have a similar story. Our family was different, right? They were “good” to their slaves. There is nothing good about owning another human. Period.
There are no slave quarters preserved here, but I looked into the history and a flood of the Mississippi probably destroyed them. Supposedly the nearby parish is still populated with the land-owning descendants of the slaves in this story. I don’t know how to verify this.
Evergreen Plantation, just down the River Road is as much dedicated to the slaves, the slave community and history, as they are about the white history and fancy parties. They have a database of names for family research and stuff. I’d like to down there and support that plantation—and see it, of course. The Laura Plantation which I saw a few years ago had a well-preserved slave quarters area and much history about that time. One way or another, while I like fancy furniture as much as the next guy, I’m more interested in what they are doing at Evergreen. Maybe they should offer, also, to be a Harvest Host location. <light bulb> I wonder if anyone has taken that up with them.
I stayed here for free but certainly spent money — the mansion tour, the River Road Museum and a meal in their super-fancy restaurant. I had shrimp and grits for a starter—which I hear about in this area but had never tried. My shrimp were gigantic, head-in-place and the grits was soaked in a buttery barbecue sauce. Fantastic but could have been my whole meal. That and the dragonfly-shaped biscuit with pecan/cane sugar butter. My main dish was redfish on dirty rice with a butter Tabasco sauce. Very good - and most of it in my refrigerator to make another meal.
Pictures of the grounds, the tour guide (I don’t know why this blogsite stretches pictures of people,) handpainted walls (detail,) a portrait of the famous pirate Jean Lafitte, inside the River Road Museum and the last three are the Carriage House where I ate, the replica plantation dishes and lovely food (picture of the redfish is blurry, oops.)
