Oak Alley Plantation: An Iconic View (Part Three)

Oak Alley Plantation, Vacherie, Louisiana

For the final portion of our tour, I promised to take everyone inside the main house at Oak Alley.  A man's reputation is won and lost on how he handles his promises, and I wouldn't want to give the impression that my promises are not worth the Ethernet they're written on.  So let's go ahead and amble up to the front door.  There we'll find a friendly guide to take us through the front door.

Here you can see the front door, and the beautiful scene that awaits visitors.  Don't be shy.  Step right in.  You are more than welcome to enjoy the wonderful scenes that await in every room.

Now, to be honest with you, I won't even try to describe the historical details and architectural features of the house.  For that, be sure to take the tour yourself.  Our own guide was bursting with stories and details that make the tour well worth the ticket price.  But I would like to share a few pictures that we took as we made our way through the house.

Speaking of guides, here you can see our guide, dressed as if she stepped right out of the Antebellum era.  For those of you who aren't familiar with the term, Antebellum refers to the period of time before the American Civil War.  That is the era to which this term is attached in the United States.  From what I understand, the rest of the world considers the years leading up to World War I as the Antebellum era.  But for our purposes, and this tour, we'll stick with the American definition.

The pictures on the far wall are paintings of Jacques and Celina Roman, who lived in this house from 1836 to 1866.  (Celina lived in the house after Jacques' death in 1848 until her own death in 1866.)

A punkah fan hangs over this long dining room table.  When the family had slaves, a house slave would sit in the corner and pull on a rope.  This kept the fan in motion, cooling the diners as they ate.

We were encouraged to keep an eye out for ghosts, especially ones that might show up in our photographs.  An active imagination might be tempted to think I caught one here, but I'll have to disappoint everyone and point out it is only the glare from the sun.  (Or is it?)  The stairs are quite steep, and in fact, one of the Roman children, Louise, fell down stairs when her hoop skirt caught.  She lost a leg in the accident.  Though it was thought that she fell down the stairs in Oak Alley, recent reports tell us she in fact was in New Orleans at the time.  But if you stand at the top of the stairs here, you can believe how easy it would be to fall down such steep stairs.

On the second floor you'll find the Roman's bedroom.  It was here that Jacques Roman died in 1848.  The historical detail in this room is wonderful to examine, including the chandelier.

Be sure to check out the detail work above the lights.

Across from the Roman Bedroom is the only room in the house that is not decorated in the Antebellum style.  This was Josephine Stewart's room.  She lived in the house from 1925 until October 3, 1972.  Mrs. Stewart founded the Oak Alley Foundation, which enables the plantation to remain open for the public.

For more information on Josephine Stewart, click here.

And if you missed the first two parts of this tour be sure to check them out.

Oak Alley Part One

Oak Alley Part Two

For more information on Oak Alley, be sure to visit their website:  Oak Alley Plantation

To see all of our posts featuring Louisiana Plantations click on the link below:
Louisiana Plantations at Room With No View

And check out our newest 2015 New Orleans Calendars:

Oak Alley Plantation: An Iconic View (Part Two)

Oak Alley Plantation, Vacherie, Louisiana.

For our second look at Oak Alley we will take a walk down the back alley.  That's right.  There are, in fact, two magnificent approaches to the house.  The trees are younger here, some of them having been planted over a hundred years later than the oaks in the front of the house by the Roman family, the rest of them added by the Stewarts another hundred years later in the 1930's.  This approach is the path visitors first use to reach the main house.

The centerpiece at the end of the lane is an iron sugar kettle, once used to refine the sugar that was the main product of this plantation.  Four kettles, the largest seven and a half feet in diameter, the smallest four feet in diameter, comprised what is known as a Jamaica Train, where cane juice was processed into crystallized sugar.  Molasses, a by-product of the process, was also produced.

Walking past the sugar kettle, and out to the end of the back alley, visitors will find the Oak Alley Restaurant, housed in a turn of the (20th) century quarter house.  It was here that tenanted farmers and their families lived, each square building consisting of four rooms centered on a single fireplace.

Breakfast is served here from 8:30 to 10:30.  Beignets and coffee are a popular choice here, as well as their Pan Perdue, a French toast covered in confectionery sugar and cane syrup.  Since it opens earlier than the house tours this is a great chance to relax and fuel up before walking the grounds.

Lunch is served from 11:00 to 3:00 p.m. with an emphasis on Cajun and Creole cuisine.  You'll have your choice of red beans and rice, fried alligator nuggets, crawfish etouffée, gumbo and a daily special from chef Antonio Reymundo.  (And don't forget to grab some bread pudding with whiskey sauce, unless you'd rather have some pecan pie.)

There is also a café open from 9 to 5 p.m. where you'll be able to grab a quick refreshment if you weren't planning on a full meal.  It is located in the gift shop, which is connected to the restaurant.

Across from the restaurant and gift shop is Oak Alley Spirits.  It was a little too early in the day for us to sample the Apple Pie Moonshine, though it did sound intriguing.

Between the restaurant and the main house is a reconstruction of the plantation's slave quarters.  The Slavery at Oak Alley exhibit, which was added in July of 2013, is an educational memorial to the slaves that built and worked this plantation.  Though slavery is forever tied to its history here, keep in mind it was only in use at Oak Alley for thirty years.

The exhibit does not shy away from the ugliness of slavery.  On display are shackles as well as implements used for punishment, including neck shackles with bells, used as a way to make it harder for an escaped slave to hide.  The children's transport shackles in the center of the picture are especially sobering.

I really liked this simple yet moving memorial inside one of the cabins.  Alongside the wall of names is a plaque that reads:

Between 1836 and the Civil War, 198 men,

women and children were enslaved at Oak Alley.

Dehumanized and quantified like any other

commodity, they appear in sales and records and

inventories, yet as people they have been all but

forgotten by history.

This is a respectful recognition of the people on whose

backs this plantation was built.  For most of them, a

name is all that remains of their story.

There is also an interactive Civil War Encampment on the grounds as well as an 1890's blacksmith shop.  If you have the time you might also enjoy the antique car garage, featuring cars from the 1920's representing the Stewart era.

In part three of our tour we will step inside the main house and look at what life was like for the Romans and Stewarts.

If you missed part one of the tour, you can follow this link to it: Oak Alley (Part One)

For more information on Oak Alley see their website here.

My View of Rosedown Plantation (Part Two)

Rosedown Plantation, St. Francisville, Louisiana.

Having taken a tour of the grounds around Rosedown Plantation in our last post, as promised, I'll give you a tour of the interior of the home on this trip.

The foyer of the house grabs your attention as soon as you step in out of the sunlight.  This open entryway is colorfully decorated with a wall paper that, while not original to the house, is an exact copy of the original wall-covering, manufactured by the original European firm that first supplied the design over one hundred and fifty years ago.

The home remained in the hands of the original family from the time it was built, in the 1830's, until the mid 1950's.  At that time, Catherine Underwood, a Texan, purchased the estate and spent $10 million on a ten-year restoration.  This included researching and commissioning the recreation of the wall décor.

Our tour was conducted by a very friendly guide, Sasha, who was full of wonderful information on the restoration as well as the history of the home.  A few rules were stressed, including the requirement that we not use a flash with our camera, and we were asked not to touch anything in the home.  It was easy to see why.  All of the furniture was original, and you could tell.  Not that it looked old and used.  Far from it.  It was all in excellent and remarkable condition, considering the humidity of Louisiana.  (Now the home is air-conditioned, which was a nice treat on that hot summer day.)   But you could simply sense that these marvelous pieces were not merely imitation tables and chairs and divans.  The Turnbulls, the family that built Rosedown, were extremely wealthy, and they furnished their home accordingly.

Being wealthy in the America South of the early 19th century, they were slave-owners.  A large plantation, Rosedown included about 450 slaves at one time.  According to the guide, this stairway was built for the Turnbulls with the skilled carpentry of their slaves.  As she pointed out, after over one-hundred and fifty years, they are still solid, and do not even creak.  A testament to the slaves' skill.

However, these were not the only stairs in the house.

In the back of the house, in the butler's pantry, between the dining room and Mrs. Turnbull's office, you can see these stairs that were used by the house servants.  When the house was restored, these stairs were left as they were found, in order to preserve their condition for display.  As you can see, the edge of the wooden steps are heavily worn down from a century of use.

This view is from the second floor, as it goes down into the butler's pantry.  At the top of these stairs is the attic, which we were not allowed to see.  (What a disappointment!)  However, it was the only part of the house we were not allowed to see.  As house tours go, it was a very thorough tour with near-total access.  Something that is not always the case in historic homes.

The dining room was still flooded with morning light, despite the fact that it was after 11 AM.  Here in the dining room, there was one main meal of the day, eaten around two in the afternoon.  According to our guide, the fan above the table was operated by a young slave who sat on a seat against the wall.  Though the guide did not mention it, I wondered if they hired servants to do this after 1865.  I'm just glad the fan above our own table is electric.

Just outside the front of the house, off to one side, was a small office built for the family's doctor.  Martha Turnbull had three children; Sarah, who would eventually raise 10 children at Rosedown, and two boys, one of which died of yellow fever at the age of seven.  Hired to care for the children, the doctor remained to care for not only the family but the entire slave population.  It was a rarity for a plantation to have a doctor on site for the slaves.

The plantation was ravaged by Northern troops during the war, and Sarah's family (she married James Bowman from the nearby Oakley Plantation) kept the plantation in operation with the aid of 250 sharecroppers.

Upstairs in the master bedroom, there was this little collection of sundries.  The wedding dress off to the left was a reproduction of Sarah's original dress.  Along the way I also saw swords, wicker bustle supports, shotguns, and lots of personal papers.

The personal papers were well preserved from the family, who never seemed to throw out any papers.  Receipts, notes, lists, sheet music, and schoolwork; it was all there for the preservationists to discover and examine.  Many of them have been laid out so that visitors can catch a glimpse of the Turnbulls' daily lives.

The master bedroom was not particularly large.  However, considering that Sarah and James had ten children, it was a fairly large (and busy!) room in comparison to the three smaller rooms that were used for the children.

Sarah lived until 1914.  Her four unmarried daughters, Corrie, Isabel, Sarah and Nina, became the sole inhabitants of Rosedown.  When Nina, the last daughter, died in 1955, they had managed to keep Rosedown debt-free, as well as held onto 3,000 acres of land, 28 acres of gardens, the house and its furnishings.  They were remarkable women, considering everything the plantation had seen, including the Civil War and the Great Depression.

The nursery looked very cozy.  It must have been, with all of those kids!  I was amused to see a fireplace in the nursery.  We are so safety conscious today, the Turnbulls might have been brought up on reckless endangerment charges for having a fireplace in the nursery.  However, as the guide pointed out, how else would they have heated the room?  And as my wife pointed out, there was probably a nursemaid on duty to keep an eye on them.  Or maybe at that time, kids were just so used to seeing fires that they weren't tempted to play with them.  Yeah, sure.

As the tour came to an end, we ended up in the library.  This beautiful room was graced with three bookshelves, one of  which you can see in the picture here.  They were not built on site, but were ordered from abroad.  They were supposed to be made with the same dimensions, but when they arrived, it was discovered that they were not of equal size.  Instead of having them sent back and others made, it was decided to offset the chimney.  This was not such a difficult decision when slaves were available to do such labor-intensive work.  Still, it seems a bit extreme.  It is sort of comforting, however, to realize that even the extremely wealthy have to deal with things like this.

Sasha did a great job of showing off the house and its history.  We were the only ones on the tour, so it was an unhurried, quiet tour.  The guide even treated us to her own rendition of Beethoven's Für Elise on the Turnbull's pre-Civil War piano.  It still sounded amazing.  Again, a difficult feat in the Louisiana humidity.  And yes, I too saw the irony in her playing a piano on which stood a card that clearly read please do not touch.

So be sure to take the time to tour the inside of Rosedown while you're visiting the grounds.  There is much more to see than what I've included here.

Next post I'll show a bit more of the formal gardens as well as introduce you to a friend I met while we were there.

Like the photograph of the approach to Rosedown at the top of this post?  It is available as a coffee mug at the following link.

Rosedown Plantation Coffee Cup