Melrose Plantation

Melrose Plantation was founded by a woman born into slavery who became the matriarch of Louisiana's most remarkable free community. Marie Thérèse Coincoin was born enslaved in 1742, freed along with her children by the French merchant Claude Metoyer, and turned a land grant into the nucleus of Isle Brevelle — the Cane River colony of gens de couleur libre, free people of color who owned plantations, businesses, and slaves of their own. Her son Louis built Melrose starting around 1810 — the Yucca House and the African House, still standing.

The plantation's second famous resident arrived a century later. Cammie Henry inherited Melrose in 1919 and turned it into a retreat for Southern Renaissance writers and artists — while running the farm with sharecroppers paid in plantation scrip that could only be spent at the plantation store. One of her cooks, Clementine Hunter, had picked cotton and pecans at Melrose for twenty-six years before moving into the kitchen. Somewhere around age fifty she picked up brushes a visiting artist had thrown away and started painting plantation life from memory — she never stopped.

Hunter painted the nine murals inside the African House when she was nearly seventy — a room the writer-in-residence François Mignon called 'the most colorful room in Louisiana.' She became one of America's most celebrated folk artists while still living in a plantation cabin. Melrose is a National Historic Landmark now, and the story it tells is doubled: the free Creole dynasty that built it, and the woman who painted its life from inside the system that kept her.