Magnolia Plantation: Most Intact in Louisiana

Along the Cane River, this plantation complex dates to a French land grant in seventeen fifty-three, when Jean Baptiste LeComte received the acreage from the colonial government. The working plantation grew through the early eighteen hundreds under Ambrose LeComte II, who called it Magnolia Grove and ran it as a cotton operation. What makes it remarkable today is what survived.

When Cane River Creole National Historical Park was established in nineteen ninety-four to protect Magnolia and nearby Oakland, it found something almost unheard of: a complete nineteenth-century plantation complex. The main house, the gin barn, a store, a blacksmith shop, and a row of standing slave cabins, all still in place. It is a National Historic Landmark.

For decades after the Civil War it operated as a sharecropping community, its Creole of color families and Black tenant farmers working the same land their ancestors had worked in bondage.