Magnolia Plantation

Magnolia Plantation has a ledger. Between 1845 and 1860, the LeComte family recorded the names of the two hundred thirty-five people they enslaved — Daniel Joe, the driver; Zelina, dead of cholera in July 1851; Honoré, drowned in 1859; children listed with their mothers, ages recorded, values estimated. It is one of the most complete records of an enslaved community in the South, and it is the reason Magnolia is a National Historical Park instead of a wedding venue.

The plantation grew out of a 1753 French land grant on Cane River; by 1860 the LeComtes owned more enslaved people and produced more cotton than anyone in the parish. The enslaved lived in seventy cabins — twenty-four of them two-room brick duplexes built around 1845, a family on each side of a shared fireplace. The main house burned during the Red River Campaign in 1864; the cabins survived, and so did the community. After emancipation the freed families stayed as tenant farmers and sharecroppers — the same cabins, the same gardens, the same yards, lived in until the 1970s.

The descendants of the enslaved — the LaCours, the Metoyers, the Rachals — are still in the community, and the park interprets the plantation from both registers: the big house that burned and the quarters that didn't. Eight of the brick cabins still stand in two rows, which is the point: Magnolia preserves the architecture of slavery, not just the architecture of the enslavers.