San Francisco Plantation — Sans Fruscins on the River Road

The San Francisco Plantation House in Garyville is one of the most extravagantly colored buildings on the Louisiana River Road, painted in blue, peach, and pistachio, with deeply overhanging cornices and wraparound galleries that give it the profile called Steamboat Gothic, as if a paddlewheel boat had been frozen in architectural form.

Edmond Marmillion began building the house after a Mississippi River crevasse in eighteen fifty-two and completed it in eighteen fifty-six, the year he died. His son Antoine and Antoine's German-born wife Louise von Seybold gave the house its eccentric interior decoration and its first name: Saint Frusquin, which was not a real saint but a play on the French phrase sans fruscins, meaning without a cent, or having lost everything, a rueful joke, by one account, about the debt that came with the house. When Achille Bougère purchased the plantation in eighteen seventy-nine, he renamed it San Francisco, and the name stuck. The house is a National Historic Landmark and one of the only major River Road plantation houses whose Creole rather than Anglo-American character is fully intact.