American Lives

Originally named Habitation Haydel, the Whitney Plantation was established in 1752 on the west bank of the Mississippi River in Louisiana by German immigrant Ambroise Heidel.

At the time this area was known as the German Coast. The Heidel name change came about over time, graduating from German to a more locally acculturated French. Approximately forty-five miles (seventy-two kilometers) west of New Orleans, it was planted with the major cash crop of the time, indigo.

In the early 1800s, Ambroise's son planted it with sugarcane, along with some rice, which continued to be staple crops for the duration of the plantation's existence.

Following the American Civil War, a businessman named Bradish Johnson bought the plantation and renamed it Whitney, the surname of one of his married daughters. Since 2014, it has been operated by the Whitney Institute, a non-profit organisation with the mission of educating the public about the legacies of slavery in the southern United States through tours, seminars, and other programming.

Seen above as it would look to those on the Mississippi River, the main house is also known as 'The Big House'. Built in 1790, the 'Big House' is one of the finest surviving examples of Spanish Creole architecture and one of the earliest-raised Creole cottages in Louisiana.

The view from the vantage point of the house, looking toward the Mississippi River, with live oaks lining the allée.

Germans who came to this area were some of the earliest settlers in the region, arriving in the early part of the 1700. Most came from the Rhineland region, but many also came from Alsace-Lorraine.

Back then and in this region, 'Americanizing' a name meant giving it a French inflection, and the fact that settlers were from a French-German area such as Alsace-Lorraine helped to meld the two cultures more naturally. The German heritage was downplayed and hidden, even lost, but is being rediscovered today.

The 'Big House' is in fact not all that big, but it was constructed at a time in which many people, free and slave owners included, lived in much smaller houses.

Built in the raised Creole Cottage style, it consists of two levels with galleries on both levels, and with both sides being accessible only from the galleries.

One of the two pigeoneers, or roosting houses for pigeons, can be seen here. These would have been a show of conspicuous wealth to those passing on the river. Enslaved people built this house for the son of the plantation's founder and the house also served at the plantation's corporate headquarters.

This is the rear of the house which exits onto the back area of the plantation. The Whitney Plantation was opened as a museum in 2015, as the passion project of retired lawyer, John Cummings, who spent about $8.6 million of his own personal money to restore and build the property before he donated it.

Working with historian Dr Imbrahima Seck, the plantation is the first museum of slavery in the United States, in that the interpretation of the property is focused on the labor and the lives of those who were enslaved here and how they would have experienced it.

This is the plantation's mid-1800s detached kitchen.

With a big lawn area in front this would have been a very active working space for enslaved domestics, including doing laundry with boiling water from the kitchen.

Detached kitchens were common in the south to keep the heat, smoke, and smells away from the owner's living quarters. Creole cuisine, with African recipes and ingredients imported into a new land, has its roots in kitchens exactly like this one.

This jail is from Gonzalez, Louisiana, and was manufactured in 1868.

It is similar in design to slave pens which were used by auction houses to confine people who were about to be sold to the highest bidder. In actuality, it would not be something that would normally be seen on a plantation, but it was used in the era of convict leasing, which was prevalent in the post-war 'Reconstruction South'.

While many believe that the Thirteenth Amendment ended slavery, there was an exemption which was used to create a prison convict leasing system of involuntary servitude to fill the labor supply shortage in the southern states after the American Civil War.

Companies and individuals paid leasing fees to state, county, and local government authorities in exchange for the labor of prisoners on farms and in mines, lumber yards, brickyards, manufacturing facilities, factories, railroads, and road construction. The convict leasing fees generated substantial amounts of revenue for southern state, county, and local budgets, and lasted through to the Second World War.

It was slavery in its worst aspects.

The plantation also contains an example of an enslaved persons' cabin, constructed of cypress trees which were harvested on the plantation. There were originally twenty-two slave cabins.

The plantation operated as a commercial site, essentially up until the late 1970s. The blue paint visible on the cabin is from 1975 when people where still using these buildings as dwellings.

In 1991, a plastics company wanted to tear down all of the plantation other than a few buildings so that it could manufacture rayon here, with the saved buildings serving as a token Creole museum. Luckily, preservationists won the day.

As many as twenty field hands would live in a building like this, with two rooms in the front, two rooms in the back, and a double-sided fireplace in between.

On the plantation's lagoon is a provocative and powerful memorial commemorating the German Coast Uprising, a rarely-mentioned episode in American history.

In January 1811, at least 125 slaves walked off their plantations and, dressed in makeshift military garb, began marching in revolt along River Road toward New Orleans. It took two days for the slaves to be suppressed by militias, with about ninety-five killed, some during fighting and some after the show trials which followed.

As a warning to other slaves, dozens were decapitated, their heads placed on spikes along River Road and in what is now Jackson Square in the French Quarter of New Orleans.

This interior view of the enslaved people's cabin shows details of the 1970s blue paint on a door frame.

All of the cabins were all in very good shape as late as then, when the family which owned the property demolished most of them to provide access for large tractor-trailers, which were hauling cane from the plantation.

In the years after emancipation, the plantation operated as a wage-labor business, with many descendants of those who had been enslaved here, several generations in fact, working and living on the same property, working from 'can't see to can't see', or sun-up to sundown.

These large iron tubs are where sugar cane was boiled down in stages. Between October and December, the processing of sugar was a twenty-four-hour operation. The successful and more lucrative growing of sugar cane was transported from areas which included Haiti, where the world's only successful slave revolt took place from 1791 to 1804 in the form of the Haitian Revolution.

With that crop came enslaved cane workers who would have spread the story of what had taken place in Haiti. This knowledge was strongly feared and harshly suppressed by the white plantation owners and, no doubt, inspired the German Coast Uprising, the largest slave insurgency in American history.

The cruel personal experience and unbearable toll of enslavement is powerfully conveyed through scholarship, solemnity, and vision at the Whitney Plantation, leading the way for a growing but still-small number of antebellum house museums which also share their histories.