LSU Rural Life Museum
Near Baton Rouge, Louisiana
On four hundred acres of former plantation land along Essen Lane in Baton Rouge, the LSU Rural Life Museum preserves one of the largest collections of Louisiana vernacular architecture. The land, called Windrush, has been in the Burden family since the eighteen thirties. Steele Burden and his siblings donated it to LSU in nineteen sixty-four in what became the largest gift the university ever received, valued at an estimated two hundred seventy million dollars.
Spread across twenty-five acres, thirty-two historic outbuildings have been relocated and restored here, including slave quarters, an overseer's house, a commissary, a blacksmith's shop, and an open-hearth kitchen. The exhibit barn houses thousands of artifacts covering two centuries of Louisiana life, from plantation slavery through Reconstruction and the industrial era. It is a rare outdoor museum where the architecture itself is the primary document.
