LET'S GO TO LAURA PLANTATION!

We took a 5 hour tour along 'the river road' to visit a plantation and passed many interesting buildings. This is a really old church. It's amazing that some of these old buildings still survive. They are made of either hand made brick or Bald Cypress. Termites don't eat Bald Cypress....so everybody wanted to build w/ it and now there isn't any left except small trees that aren't useful for lumber. But folks recycle the old boards over and over...it brings high dollar.

We passed some houses/plantations where movies have been filmed. The people who farmed along River Road were THE richest folks in America. They planted sugarcane....that land is too wet for cotton.

This is Laura Plantation and I picked this tour because it is a real Creole place. They always painted their houses in bright colors. So when you see a white house w/ big pillars you know "Americans" lived there. This house was built in 1805 and is about 40 miles from New Orleans. The plantation was originally 12,000 acres. It sits only 600 ft. from the Mississippi River and had a levee of 4 to 5 ft. The levee is now 15 feet.

AMAZING! The black type that you see is the name of each plantation all along the river in 1858.

The place had a sugarmill and this is one of the huge sugar pots used for processing the sugarcane. There was sugarcane planted all around the place...I'd never seen a field of sugarcane. (This is not planted w/ sugarcane...it's an ornamental plant.)

A door inside the house. It looks like they used some kind of comb to make this pattern. Some of the investors that helped to restore the house are descendants of slaves. Fats Domino's parents and other family members lived on Laura Plantation. It's said that what eventually became the stories of B'rer Rabbit came from slaves on this plantation.

The end of a fireplace...it's wood painted to look like marble. Interesting.

I like the blue ceiling. The 'farm' continued to function as a plantation into the 20th century.

A colorful door. Laura Lacoul Gore was the 4th mistress of this plantation...she was born there in 1861 and inherited it and ran it until 1891. I found it pleasing and so interesting that this palantation was run mostly by women...and successfully too! Laura wrote a book in 1936

called "Memories of the Old Plantation" and I ordered it from Amazon. In the above picture Laura is dressed for a Mardi Gras celebration.

One thing we DIDN'T like about our tour was that our group had 29 people and by the time everybody crowded into the small rooms...we couldn't see the furniture. When I'd hang back to get a picture...I'd miss what the tour guide was saying in the next room.

The nursery and that's the office in the next room. Laura Plantation was sold to a German family named Waguespach in 1891. We didn't go out to the slave quarters etc...it was just too damn HOT!! And it was a pretty far walk.

This is a glimpse of Oak Alley Plantation. Our tour bus headed over there after we left 'Laura' to pick up another tour group. The lady who owned this place had all the Spanish Moss removed from the trees. She hated it and thought it was creepy. I think it's pretty.

12 Oak trees on each side of Oak Alley and of course that's how it got it's name. These trees are over 200 years old. It sure is picturesque! Our tour guide was excellent and a wealth of info all about the history of this whole area...plus New Orleans. (An example is that antebellum women never, ever drank alcohol in front of the men....so how'd they catch a buzz? They ate fermented fruit that had a higher alcohol content than wine or brandy!) Man, that guy could TALK...on the trip back we were tired of hearing him.

Another 'big house'. We went over Lake Pontchartrain (it's the 3rd biggest lake in the U.S.) on the way back into New Orleans and the guide pointed out a Bald Eagle's nest, houseboats on the bayous where folks live etc.