Mississippi River Plantations

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From Baton Rouge we drove Highway 1 along the Mississippi - the Plantation Road - to New Orleans. The Mississippi - we drove along it all day, but the levees are so high you can't see it unless you go over a bridge and there are No Trespassing signs all over for companies that have road access up the levees. There are industrial and oil storage facilities all the way along and when we did get a glimpse of the river and ports, it looks huge and full of barges and boats and cranes alongside.

We toured three sugar plantations along the Mississippi - Nottoway, Oak Alley and Laura Plantations. There are two types of plantation homes in Louisiana - the Creole ones built by people who immigrated to Louisiana from other countries - France, Spain, Portugal etc. and the American ones built by previous US citizens who migrated west for new land. The American one we toured - Nottoway is 53000 sq ft!!! - very huge and ornate - the Americans who immigrated there built their mansion and used it as their full time home. The Creole plantation homes were used as summer homes on the plantation and they had their bigger mansions in New Orleans. We toured Oak Alley and Laura - both Creole plantation owners. The owner of Oak Alley wanted it to be the full time home, but his wife preferred New Orleans. Oak Alley is a beautiful large antebellum style home, but not on the scale of Nottoway. It is the most popular plantation to visit and there were a lot of tourists there. There must have been 30 people on the tour we took while there were only 6 on our Nottoway tour. While not the grandest of homes, Laura Plantation has won numerous awards as one of the best historical sites in America. The guide was fantastic and we learned a lot of history of the area, the slaves, and the culture there during that era. It was interesting to learn of the quadroon balls held each year where young black girls attend the ball where they would be "picked" by a Plantation owner who would "keep" her as a mistress. The lighter skinned girls were favored, the mulattos, a product of a European and Negro, thus the name quadroon. French was commonly spoken in Louisiana until 1916 when the US gov't made it illegal to speak French in schools. We also learned some things about the Civil War from a nice old gentleman who was dressed in a Confederate Uniform in front of a mock up army tent.

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