Chapter 14. Laura Plantation

With Robert busy at school again we decided to head off to another antebellum home. However this one was different. It was a Creole Plantation called “Laura”. A historic sugar plantation built in 1805, where the Guided Tour transports you into Louisiana's Creole culture. Named by Lonely Planet Travel as the "Best History Tour in the U.S.," the one-hour guided visit is based upon 5,000 pages of documents found in the French National Archives and upon Laura's Memories of the Old Plantation Home, which dramatically tells 250 years of true-life stories of Creole women, slaves and children. The Laura farmstead is surrounded by fields of sugarcane and boasts 11 historic buildings on the National Register, including slave cabins in which the West-African folktales of Compair Lapin (later known as Br'er Rabbit) were recorded over 140 years ago.

We started the tour in the basement, which also doubled as a wine cellar, The Gore family were the largest wine export company in the South in the 1800’s. We were shown how houses were put together by numbers scratch into the wooden floor boards and beams. We moved out into the garden which was recreated from letters from Laura to her family in Paris. Then we moved inside through the men’s business suite, people never entered the house through the front door in Creole houses these were used to let the breeze flow through from the river. In a Creole house they were known as animal doors. Because of all the bugs and critters that would get into the house through these doors. Creoles were often offended when invited into their neighbors homes through the front doors. After viewing the inside of the house we moved out to the slave quarters and surrounding grounds. The tour was amazing so very different to the tours at the other plantations, our guide was the owner of the house so his passion for the history of the land was hard to ignore.
We finished our tour with another specialty of the South dinning on PO-Boys for lunch at Dave’s Grille. Traditionally PO-Boys were seafood, usually crawfish, but looking around we decided chicken was the safer option! But none the less we did enjoy our PO-Boys.

(Yes we are home now but I will catch up with the blogs...eventually)

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