Plantations

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On our drive down the Great River Road toward New Orleans, we stopped at a couple of plantations. The first, Nottoway, was a beautiful structure built by a family that bought up all kinds of land when they arrived in America and spent many years building it. The home was interesting for a few reasons: the first family were pack rats, so their heritage was completely known (as well as everyone who lived in the house after them), the house was now a bed and breakfast, so you could stay in the house and have breakfast there, in the actual bedrooms and dining rooms that belonged to the families, and the windows. Yes, the windows. There were 365 windows in the mansion, and even every closet had a window. And those didn't just overlook the window across the hall or a fireplace or something...they overlooked porches. Every single window looked out over several wrap-around porches that were on both levels of the house...and each bedroom had a door out onto a porch. You could get to each room in the house either by walking through the indoor hallways, or by walking along an exterior porch. But that's not all. Many of the windows ran from floor to ceiling...and they were split horizontally right in the center. When you opened the large windows, they were on a pulley system to help with the great weight of each of the 5'5" halves. Then, once opened, they were DOORS. Doors to the porches...each room on the first floor had them, and then each hallway upstairs to separate porches had the same "door" windows. It was so very awesome!

The next plantation we stopped at we only stayed long enough to take pictures of the front entrance. This was Oak Alley. The place was similar to the last plantation we had been to, so we didn't opt to take the tour, but the plantation is one of the more recogniseable and famous as it has been in a few movies like "Interview with the Vampire" and because it's on most brochures and pictures advertising the plantations of the south.

The last plantation we went to was more of a history lesson on the ethnicities and culture of New Orleans itself. It was named Laura, and was the closest to New Orleans out of the three we visited. We learned a lot about what it meant to be Creole and how they ran their plantations differently from the "Anglos." Creoles were simply the French (and sometimes German) settlers in the river delta. They built their plantations as work areas and only lived in the during the sugar cane season. Unlike the columned white plantation structures that new European settlers were building to live and work in, their actual homes were in the French Quarter of New Orleans. The differences and peculiarities to what we think of as plantation life were numerous and extremely interesting, from the idea that women could own and run everything to how they decorated the inside and met businessmen. The best part of this tour? The guide was the owner. He knew everything about it, and had even made a documentary of the life of one of the residents that won first prize in the Los Angeles film festival last year. What an awesome tour guide, and tour!

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Comments

[Ellen]

Lemonade
I must be having an attack of the vapors . . . this makes me want to climb up to the veranda and drink myself a long, cool lemonade.