New Iberia   From that fast-food and hotel area near the highway, Central Avenue leads northward in 7-8 minutes to downtown New Iberia. It ends at a T-intersection at East Main Street, right at my destination, Shadows-on-the-Teche, a property (one of nineteen) belonging to the National Trust for Historic Preservation. After Avery Island, Shadows was my second destination of the day, described below. The mansion stood on the north side of Main Street, between it and the Teche, in a garden area behind a high fence. A rather attractive columned house across the street acted as the visitor center, giving a nicely urban, yet small-town feeling. Further into town, I was pleased to see that it was absolutely charming. Main Street had pleasant shops and restaurants. Only that morning, I had looked up restaurants online, and had easily decided on Clementine’s right on Main Street, which I checked out at this time. It became obvious that that commercial area on the edge of town helped keep the center authentic. It was neither extreme—neither were there just food shops for locals, nor were there solely gift shops for tourists. As a matter of fact, I didn’t see any tourists or gift shops at all. The Evangeline Theater—there’s that name again—is former art-deco movie theater (1930-1960) on the National Register of Historic Places, which was now an arts center, and New Iberia gave a very pleasant impression. New Iberia bills itself as the Queen City of the Bayou Teche, and, while it’s a town rather than a city, it seems to earn that title.

During the couple of decades the Spanish were in charge, New Iberia was founded by Spanish settlers, who, since Spain and Portugal form the Iberian Peninsula, named it Nueva Iberia. Main Street, which had been an Indian trail, became a Spanish trail. When the French took over again, the town became La Nouvelle Ibérie. When the Americans took over, after trying the Latin version of the name, Nova Iberia, they finally settled on the English, New Iberia. Street names show the heritage, with the English name having a smaller French version above and also a smaller Spanish version below. As an example I’ll cite where West Main Street (Rue Principale Ouest, Calle Principal Oeste) intersects with New Iberia Street (Rue de la Nouvelle Ibérie, Calle de Nueva Iberia). This adds a compelling historic—to say nothing of language--component.

But I had come here for Shadows-on-the-Teche. Entering the columned house across the street for a tour, I came across the first of several very pleasant surprises. It was a weekday afternoon, and there were no other visitors, so I was to have a private tour. Then, since I was a member of the National Trust for Historic Preservation eligible for a tour at no charge, I showed the man my membership card, and was surprised at his reaction. Apparently they don’t get that many Trust members coming all the way down to Louisiana to see this property, so he walked me back into the main office to show my card—and me—to the museum director, where we all three had a bit of a chat. This was a pleasant and friendly way to start a visit.

Then I saw that the exact nature of Shadows-on-the-Teche had eluded me up to now. In the two following days, I’d be on the other (eastern) side of the Atchafalaya visiting plantation houses, six on the Mississippi and one on Bayou Lafourche. The nature of plantation houses implies open-area locations in the countryside. Since Shadows was a National Trust property, and located right in town, I had assumed it was just a town mansion of some sort. But I found out immediately that it, too, was a plantation house, and New Iberia had grown up around it, with its center further down Main Street. Shadows, the home of the Weeks family, faced the Teche to the north and retained its large garden, although some houses had been built to its left and right as the town grew. The original plantation, though, had extended for miles to the south. As a matter of fact, there was a salt dome called Weeks Island near Avery Island. So it turned out that I was to see a plantation house on Bayou Teche as well, and it was to serve as an introduction to the others.

This also explained something that had confused me. Why had Central Avenue (Avenue Centrale, Avenida Central) joined East Main Street (Rue Principale Est, Calle Principal Este) so far to the east of the center of town, and not in its center, as the name seems to imply? The answer is that Central Avenue had been the central road of the Weeks Plantation, explaining why it came up to the location of Shadows, and not to the center of town.

Shadows had been built in 1834 by sugarcane planter David Weeks, but he died (and is buried in Connecticut) just as it was completed, so his wife ran the plantation. Just this one sentence gives typical information that would be a repeated theme again and again for the next days: (1) most of the mansions I’d see dated from the 1830’s and 1840’s; (2) sugar was the foundation for the wealth of most of the planters; (3) tragedy was a typical way of life, with spouses, most often husbands, dying off, also many, many children; (4) women so very frequently became the ones who ran the plantations.

Shadows was the home to four generations of Weekses. The last was a man who restored the mansion and gardens from personal funds, and whose wish was to see the National Trust take it over, along with the endowment he left. The Trust was only a decade old then and had only four other houses, but finally agreed to accept Shadows. The very next day that last Weeks died. That the mansion needed restoration is another typical element (5) of plantation houses. I think every one I saw had stood empty, abandoned, and vandalized at some period in its more recent history, and if they hadn’t been rescued by preservationists—individuals or organizations--would be gone.

The restored garden includes many live oaks. Live oaks are a variety of oak that grows along the coastal areas in the South, in a very narrow strip along the Atlantic (Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia), everywhere in Florida, and in a wide coastal trip along the Gulf, and well into Texas. The trees grow heavy and thick, and typically develop huge, exposed roots, and overhanging branches reaching seemingly everywhere. Frequently the branches are the home of Spanish moss, which is neither Spanish, nor a moss, but an air plant, which gets nutrients from the air and does no harm to its host tree. I discovered on this trip that there is a Live Oak Society, with which you can register your tree(s). They will come and measure the large ones and estimate their age. I read that girths over 16 feet / 4.9 meters are classified as centenarians. In any case, combine an image of live oaks, Spanish moss, and bayous, and you have a truly idyllic Louisiana scene.

Shadows-on-the-Teche, has all its original furnishings, which is not typical, since most restorations contain pieces from the period, but not original to the homes. It’s a brick, Greek Revival mansion, yet its square columns of plastered brick look quite a bit less like Tara from Gone With the Wind than you’d expect (others I’d see resembled Tara more). The layout is typical of this area, but quite surprising, since it goes back to local tradition and has no hallways or internal stairs. Picture a lower floor of six rooms, three in front, three in back, all with essential cross-ventilation. The rooms connect to each other, but otherwise, each has an outside door to a ground-floor gallery going all around the house. The upper floor is set up the same way, but its rooms go out to an upper-level gallery that surrounds the house. The only staircases connecting the two levels are outside between the galleries. There is also no spectacular front door. All the external doors from the individual rooms are the same. But the house in this style is typical for the area, and I saw a number of others like it.

The guide left me to walk around the garden afterward. I walked the short distance down the slope to the Teche, which was perhaps 15 yards/meters across, with houses in the sun on the other side. Only when looking at the bayou did I finally realize where the house got its name. The live oaks surrounding Shadows-on-the-Teche really do cast dreamy shadows on the Teche.

Evangeline   I’ve mentioned the name Evangeline as the name of a parish and the name of the theater in New Iberia. There is also an Evangeline Parkway leading into Lafayette. Apparently people take Evangeline around here quite seriously (and rightly so), so it’s time for a discussion of it.

I’ve said in the past that I’d had enriched classes in later elementary school, especially 6th grade. I talked about my Spitsbergen connection to 6th grade (2006/6); this July I’ll refer back to that class and its sessions of (classical) music appreciation; in that class we read the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, which I quoted on the Antarctica trip (2006/15), and it was also there that we read Longfellow’s “Evangeline”, which we’ll discuss now.

In 1847, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote his highly successful epic poem “Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie”. (Either he was using the French name Acadie for flavor, or he considered it to be a poetic version of the English Acadia.) It’s a tragic, but fictional account of two Acadian lovers, Evangeline Bellefontaine and Gabriel Lajeunesse, who are separated on their very wedding day and deported. Evangeline then spends years in a lifelong search for Gabriel. In Louisiana at one point she just misses him. Evangeline eventually settles in Philadelphia, and as an old woman, becomes a nun among the poor. During an epidemic, as she tends the dying, she finally finds Gabriel among them, on his deathbed, and he dies in her arms. She dies soon afterward.

There are other versions of the story, usually purporting to tell about the “real” Evangeline and Gabriel. The best known was published in 1907 about Emmeline Labiche and Louis Arceneaux, in which Emmeline goes searching for Louis in Maryland, then Louisiana, where she does find him, under an oak tree on Bayou Teche in Saint Martinville. Although this sounds promising so far, it is not. Louis turns out to be married, Emmeline eventually loses her sanity, and dies.

Evangeline is definitely fictional. Emmeline is possibly fictional as well, although supposedly based on a real person. But none of this really matters. The point is that these characters are symbolic of Acadian hardships, and the Cajuns have adopted the Evangeline story into their culture, obvious from the frequent use of the name. There is a quaint blending of the stories of Evangeline and Emmeline. In Saint Martinville is a statue of Evangeline, and there also stands the Evangeline Oak, under which she and Gabriel met. Now doubters may object and say that, although Evangeline and Gabriel had each separately “been” in Louisiana, it was in Philadelphia where they finally met, and that it was Emmeline and Louis (if they had indeed existed) who had supposedly met under the oak now called the Evangeline Oak. Doubters, shame! Get into the spirit of things—it’s all symbolic. Part of “Faust” takes place in a real location in Leipzig called Auerbachs Keller, today a restaurant. Inside, there’s a statue of Faust facing Mephisto across the way. And in Madrid is the most famous statue of many of Don Quijote and Sancho Panza. Do doubters also deny these characters? HA! Evangeline lives!

Aside from the history the story reminds us of, we have to look at some of the text. The poem is epic and rather long, but we can pick out just a few lines. In class we memorized the opening words:

The forest speaks through its trees, which bewail Acadia in murmuring voices. These voices are sad, and this sadness had foreshadowed the future that awaited the Acadians.

Acadia (Nova Scotia) abuts the ocean. Hearing the forest, the ocean with its own deep voice shows it is just as unconsolable about the fate of the Acadians.

This brings to mind the long rocky coast running from Maine through Nova Scotia, and also my return to Peggys Cove just south of Halifax (2005/6), with the line I keep on quoting that was posted on a sign, admonishing one to “Savour the Sea”--which I regularly do, here on our Water Planet. Visualize those cliffs of Nova Scotia and savoring the sound of the waves crashing below. This is how the sea speaks. Now savor the sea speaking in Longfellow’s couplet above. The word “Speaks”, which logically completes the first line, doesn’t appear there. Instead it CRASHES in with the stressed syllable at the beginning of the second line. This line should be read with a slight pause after “Speaks”. Read the couplet this way and not only will the ocean speak to you, you’ll even feel the spray.

A bit more from the Prelude (a roe is a roe deer, the male of which is a roebuck):

At this point the Prelude ends:

After the Prelude, the poem starts with a description of Grand-Pré and the life there, of the almost-wedding, of the expulsion. Evangeline then searches for years and years for Gabriel over large parts of the eastern United States, sometimes just missing him by a day. In the end, as an old woman, as she’s working in an almshouse with the poor and dying, she suddenly sees him.

It’s even better when not condensed. Here are some parts of the Epilogue, which then follows this climactic scene:

The Epilog achieves closure by reflecting the forest and ocean of the Prologue, first dealing with the lovers in exile, then with Acadia. Twice Longfellow starts with “Still stands”, turning around the logical sentence to begin with two stressed words for impact: nature remains, while people do not, other than in collective memory. But that’s the point. While still the forest murmurs and the ocean Speaks!!!, now Acadians everywhere have Evangeline’s story to tell, and to remind them, and us all, of the past.

Saint Martinville   I remember the first time we were in Saint Martinville, and it was part of the second of the two Great Treks that Beverly and I did, that I’ve discussed in the past. We wanted to see North America, and had a Volkswagen camper to do it. In 1968 we drove 10,000 miles round trip out of New York to the western US and Canada, then in 1969 we did 8,000 miles in the East, first a northern loop into Canada, then a southern loop around the South.

By that time, Beverly had also read “Evangeline”, and was as ready as I was to include visiting the sites connected with it. When in Nova Scotia, according to Beverly’s travel diary, it was on 11 July 1969 that we visited Grand-Pré National Historic Site, which includes a reconstructed Acadian church, a traditional well, diked fields, and statues of Evangeline and Longfellow. As it then worked out, we were in Louisiana and stopped in Saint Martinville just 21 days later, on 1 August 1969 to see the Evangeline sites there.

So here it was, just a year short of four decades later that I drove from the larger town (33,000) of New Iberia to the smaller (7,000) town of Saint Martinville. The drive north didn’t take much more than about 15-20 minutes from one parish seat to the other. Given the French flavor of the area, the town is also occasionally known as Ville de Saint-Martin.

The quaint town has at its center a large village green called Saint Martin Square / Place Saint-Martin, in the center of which is the Church of Saint Martin de Tours (1765). Historic buildings surround the square. Behind the square it’s only one short block to Bayou Teche, which should be one’s first destination.

There is a tiny park on the bayou at the end of the street. The miniscule park has a large live oak in its center. On its bayou side is a gazebo to enjoy the view, as well as a raised boardwalk to the left to walk along the bayou behind a museum of Acadian history. The scene is idyllic, almost as good as it was earlier in the day at Shadows-on-the-Teche, downstream just a bit in New Iberia. But this park also has a bust of Longfellow, and a couple of very interesting informational signs.

Louisiana is serious about French. On re-entering the state from Mississippi, the sign that said “Welcome to Louisiana” also said, in equally large lettering, “Bienvenue en Louisiane”. The historical marker here, which I copied verbatim, was also bilingual. I’ll put down the French first. See if you can follow, before resorting to the English version. [I’ll also remind that, when we discussed the names Lon Chaney and Dick Cheney (2005/18), we said the names were based on the French word for “oak”, chêne (SHEN).]

Perhaps you could follow the French reasonably well, given knowledge of the story. But the two statements, while each conveys its message adequately, do not really translate each other particularly well and are just a bit sloppy. The English mentions exile from Nova Scotia by name, while the French says “exiled from their country”. The English says the exile was in 1755; the French says “starting in 1755”. These two differences could be accidental, but also look just a bit political in nature. Then, while the French puts the names in parentheses, the English forces itself to use the word “counterparts”, without further explaining in just what way they were counterparts of each other. The parentheses sweep the confusion under the rug better.

I found the news on the second sign to be exciting. This sign had French on it, not only because of Louisiana sensibilities, but because of Canadian ones. Again I’ll put the French first, and will point out that jumeau is a (male) twin, jumelle is a (female) twin, and jumelage is the phenomenon of twinning.

What a clever idea! What a right thing to do! Joining together two museum-type sites that are mutually significant to tell the complete story, and that also cross international lines. The translations match well as far as they go. But at the bottom was additional information only in French. Perhaps they felt it can be easily figured out, so so will I:

The other Evangeline site in town was back on the square, in the small burial ground to the side of the church. It was just as charming as the Evangeline Oak on Bayou Teche, as long as you didn’t get too confused by the pseudohistorical atmosphere. What was until now an Evangeline-Emmeline blend becomes an Evangeline-Emmeline-Dolores blend.

In this churchyard is the Evangeline statue. It stands on a pedestal and is about ¾ life size. Evangeline is seated, looking to the left, somewhat like Whistler’s Mother, but unlike her, Evangeline’s face is turned partway toward the viewer. She’s wearing the full-length dress of the period, and her sabots protrude from under the hemline. While people associate these wooden shoes with Holland, they were used anywhere where wet field work was being done, such as in Acadia or in Louisiana. (During the Industrial Revolution, disgruntled factory workers in France would throw their sabots into machinery to jam it; hence the word “sabotage”.)

The curiosity of the quite attractive Evangeline statue is that it marks the supposed grave of Emmeline Labiche. But the story gets better. In 1929, Hollywood came to Saint Martinville when a silent-film version of “Evangeline” was filmed starring Mexican film star Dolores del Rio. After the filming was over, del Rio and the film company decided to commission this statue. She posed for it and then donated it to the town in a presentation in 1931.

So as you look at this attractive statue and the whole Evangeline story goes through your mind, you realize you’re looking at Dolores’s face on Evangeline’s statue over Emmeline’s grave (possibly). Yet in its own way, it all still seems to fit together.

It was late in the afternoon, but I wanted to do one last thing here. Just one mile north of Saint Martinville is the Longfellow-Evangeline State Historic Site. It’s on the site of a plantation house from 1815, but most memorable from when we had seen it the last time was the very simple Acadian cabin, also a farmstead. I remember the rural atmosphere of the cabin from years ago, and I didn’t require a new visit.

But something else has stayed with me since then: the demonstration of a (spinner’s) weasel. However, I could quite picture how it worked anymore, so I went into the visitor center, which was about to close, and the curator was kind enough to show me a similar weasel, so everything in Saint Martinville worked out just right.

A weasel is the name of a yarn-measuring machine stemming from the period of spinning wheels. Picture a low windmill—that is, a post with 4-6 windmill-like turnable arms in front. Pegs sticking out of each arm would hold yarn, and as the weasel was turned, usually by a child, the yarn would be wound around the pegs. Weasels also usually had a wooden counting device in the stand. You could set the ratchet for as many yards of yarn you wanted counted, after which the device would click. This click is what became famous in “Pop goes the weasel”.

A little digression fits in here, based on naming devices after animals, such as a weasel. This is not unusual—just consider the computer mouse. There is also a horse used in gymnastics. But I want to discuss something else named after a horse, and also after a deer.

Carpenters put four legs, shaped like two upside-down V’s, on a piece of wood stock and also call that a horse, or, lengthening the word, a sawhorse, for use in carpentry. A similar device is named after a deer. This device, used for rougher work, like cutting logs, extends the four legs above the piece of wood stock so they now look like two X’s. Actually, the word “deer” isn’t used, rather the name for a male deer, a buck. Like the sawhorse, this buck is also called a sawbuck.

Talk about transfer of meaning: early ten-dollar bills had instead of, or in addition to, the number “10”, the Roman numeral X on them. For the resemblance of the X to the woodsman’s sawbuck, people began calling the ten-dollar bill a sawbuck as in “Do you have change for a sawbuck?” This usage was more common in the earlier 20C than today. If you’re thinking that this also is why dollars are called bucks in general, that’s not so. “Bucks” probably developed from when buckskins were used as a medium of exchange. In any case both words used for currency, “sawbuck” and “buck”, very much have an American frontier flavor about them.

There’s one more part to this digression, and it’s my favorite, since it stems from New Orleans and its region and has the flavor if its history. It also refers to the ten-dollar bill. For this you have to first remember the culture of New Orleans of the time when the French lived isolated in the French Quarter, while across the “neutral ground” of Canal Street and stretching to the Garden District lived the newly-arrived Americans. You also have to be aware that, before the federal government issued banknotes, various banks issued their own notes privately. With that background, here are the facts.

In the French Quarter, French banks issued their currency written, in course, in French. Just as you will see today on English-language currency the word TEN (or FIVE or ONE), the French ten-dollar bill had on the back the French word for TEN, DIX (pronounced DEESS).

But these French notes also circulated among the Americans across the neutral ground. And they started referring to the French ten-dollar bills with DIX on them as “dixies”: “Do you have two fives for a dixie?” But as with all notes issued by local banks, the French currency, including the dixies, were limited to the New Orleans region, and the region where dixies were acceptable currency was called “Dixieland”: “Don’t try using your dixies over in Florida—they’re only good here in Dixieland”.

But then in time things changed even further. “Dixie” after a while no longer referred to currency, and “Dixieland” developed an alternate short form, also “Dixie”, which eventually referred to the entire US South, probably due to the minstrel tune “Dixie”. This became the de facto national anthem of the Confederacy, so Dixie the song referred to Dixie the place. I maintain that “Dixieland” never did refer to the entire South; it has always referred to the New Orleans area, which is why, as jazz developed, it was called “dixieland jazz”, synonymous with “New Orleans jazz”. Then in time “dixieland jazz” shortened to just “dixieland”, so now it’s no longer a place at all, but a genre of music.

I’d better summarize the current meanings of all this. “Dixie” today no longer refers to currency, it refers to the South, and to the minstrel song, and “dixieland” doesn’t really refer to any place at all any more, it refers to a type of jazz music. Clear?

So I left my weasel and Saint Martinville for the drive back to New Iberia and dinner at Clementine’s. It was all wood-paneling and conviviality. I had dinner at the bar, and chatted with people, including the bartender, who told me that Wayne, the owner, admired a local artist named Clementine Hunter and named the restaurant after her. The bartender also told me he had just moved to New Iberia from Baton Rouge to marry a local girl, and that the wedding was going to take place down the street in the garden of Shadows-on-the-Teche. Also, Clementine’s was going to cater it. With all this news and information, I felt a further bonding with the town. After a while, Wayne came up to talk, and also introduced me to a local chef. When I asked him if he served any port, he said he didn’t, but treated me to a special private zinfandel he kept on hand. I really felt quite at home.

I later checked about Clementine Hunter, who lived to age 102 (1886-1988). She is Louisiana’s most famous black artist. Her style was primitive, and she is referred to as the black Grandma Moses. She was the first African-American woman to exhibit at the New Orleans Museum of Art, and, although she remained illiterate her whole life, she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from a local university. On my last day in Louisiana, while touring Madewood Plantation House, I saw several of her paintings on display.

It’s hard to believe that all the above happened on my first day back in Bayou Country: Avery Island and Tabasco, New Iberia and Shadows, Saint Martinville and Evangeline, Clementine’s. It was an active, but enjoyable day.

Plantation Houses   I had two more days I wanted to spend seeing plantation houses, and there were seven on my list, recommended by Michelin. I had been planning on 2 ½ days to do so, but my flight back to Tampa via Atlanta had been moved earlier, cutting off the half-day. Therefore, the first morning I got up at 7 AM, skipped breakfast, and got on the highway early to cross the Atchafalaya to the Bayou Lafourche-Mississippi River area closer to New Orleans.

This area along the Mississippi with the high concentration of plantation houses between Baton Rouge and New Orleans is called the River Road, or, more grandly, the Great Mississippi River Road. It contains one of the South’s finest collection of antebellum plantation houses.

I hadn’t expected Shadows the day before to be an introduction to what I’d see here, but most of these, too, were two-story mansions, mostly in Greek Revival style with broad double galleries serving as outdoor “rooms”. Some, but not all, had those monumental columns, or pillars, that one expects. Although Shadows seemed to face away from the Teche, all the ones here faced the Mississippi (and Madewood faced Bayou Lafourche), which served originally as a spacious street. The main entry facing the river served to welcome visitors arriving by boat.

Early on, plantations here grew indigo for its blue dye; eventually, maybe a few did cotton, but the main crop in this entire region all eventually changed to sugar, which surprised me, since I felt sugar usually came from the Caribbean. Most of the buildings were built by wealthy sugar planters in the thirty years preceding the Civil War, and dates in the 1840’s and 1850’s were particularly frequently heard. In their heyday there were more than 2000 plantations. I saw river maps of the Mississippi—the most extensive one was at Houmas House—of the hundreds of plantations extending from the both river banks, typically with just a bit of river frontage, but then extending miles back, away from the river. The map showed plantations starting from outside New Orleans past Baton Rouge and up to Natchez, Mississippi. I remember hearing that a majority of known US millionaires of the period either lived, or had homes, in this area. Many plantations survived the Civil War reasonably well, frequently hiring the freed enslaved workers as sharecroppers. Of course there are many stories of the ups and downs in the owners’ lives, and also in the ways they treated their enslaved workers, some cruelly, others more benignly, letting workers buy their freedom over time. There were quite a number of former slave cabins to visit.

After the 1920’s there was a decline in the sugar industry. Many of the houses (all that I visited) were abandoned at one time or another and fell into ruin. Then dredging the river caused industrialization. River Road today has contrasts: the antebellum mansions and cane fields, but also petrochemical plants and suburban strip developments. Sugar is still a crop, and remember driving past a sugar refinery. But I found the petrochemical plants, while looking industrial, didn’t look dirty, and you just had to turn your glance from certain directions.

“River Road” in the singular is a misnomer. There’s a road on each side of the river, and each one changes its number designation periodically. River Road also cuts in front of all the Plantation Houses, lying between them and the levees. The houses had better views when they were built, since there were levees then at the most 1-2 yards/meters high, but now, from the ground floors, you see the River Road and the grassy slope of the levee behind it, which is about a story or more tall. If you go upstairs in a house, you can see the view of the river over the levee. You can also walk up the grassy slope to the path on top and see the concrete slope on the river side of the levee. (Here’s another parallel between the Mississippi and the Rhine, or Rijn: move a levee to the Netherlands and you’d call it a dike, or dijk.)

DESTREHAN Coming from New Iberia, I stopped here first, the closest one to New Orleans, then worked my way back west during the day. Destrehan lies to the north of the river, and is the oldest plantation house in the Mississippi Valley, dating from 1787. However it was modernized in the Greek Revival style in 1839, and presents eight columns in front of two galleries to the—well, not to the river any more, but to the levee and road out front. It is now owned by the River Road Historical Society, but arrangements had to be made with Marathon Oil, whose facilities are visible behind the property. I got the impression the house would have been torn down by the oil company, which had owned this piece of land as well, without the prodding of public opinion and the Historical Society. One accepts the petrochemical towers peeking out behind the beautiful live oaks with a feeling of “let’s be happy we at least have what we do of our heritage”. There are craft demonstrations, including indigo dyeing, since being an indigo plantation was how Destrahan started out.

Leaving Destrehan, I crossed back to the south side of the river, and after about an hour on River Road, came to the town of Vacherie, which has Oak Alley on its one side and Laura on the other.

OAK ALLEY As with most plantation houses, you first see Oak Alley from the two-lane River Road that runs between it and the grassy slope constituting the dry side of the levee. And right beyond the low gate you get your first view of those trees. It is a view not easily forgotten. You then turn onto the property along sugarcane fields, and pull up in back. Finances are worth bringing up here: these properties are expensive to maintain, and, aside from the usual gift shop, Oak Alley maintains a large restaurant operation to support the entire enterprise, all located discretely in back.

You usually come for the house. Oak Alley, the house, is marvelous, yet has to be secondary here. First come the trees. Running from the house back up to the road is a quarter-mile / 0.4 kilometer allée of probably the most impressive live oaks anywhere. There are 28 trees, 14 on each side of the center path. I walked the full length of the path to enjoy the trees. Remember the huge girth these trees reach, plus the many exposed roots, and the solid canopy above of branches. Fortunately, when planted, they were spaced sufficiently to allow for the growth they have now attained.

This is one of the few places where I’d suggest the Worthy Reader google some pictures of Oak Alley. This collection of trees is worth seeing just on its own. In their own gentle way, I’d compare them with California’s redwoods and sequoias.

These trees are ancient. The visitor is surprised to find they predate the house by over a century. These two rows of live oaks date to the early 1700’s, and most likely are older than New Orleans itself, founded in 1718, so the trees are tricentenarians. It is assumed that an early settler built a simple cabin here and planted the trees along the path down to the Mississippi, which served as his highway. That cabin is now long gone, and it was a no-brainer to locate Oak Alley (the house) at the end of the allée of oaks when it was built in 1839.

A bit of word study here. We first discussed the French word allée (German Allee) when we talked about Rilke’s Herbsttag (2007/17): “...und wird in den Alleen ... wandern ...”. An allée is a very upscale concept, describing either a row of trees, or a boulevard lined with such rows of trees. Unfortunately, the English version of this word, alley, has taken on about as downscale a meaning for a walkway as can be imagined: a narrow place between buildings with dumpsters filled with garbage. It’s amazing how words can diverge like this over time. It has to be obvious that Oak Alley is using the English form with the French meaning. Or, here’s a wild guess: the settler had to be French, and quite possibly originally named the rows of trees Les Allées des Chênes. Just a thought.

One then drags oneself away from the chênes to inspect the house, which is also very worthy. It has the spectacular Greek Revival columns, with two galleries. From the upper gallery you can see over the levee to the river. The house forms a square with a total of 28 columns on all sides. This house does have center hallways and internal staircases, so it’s architecturally a different style then some of the others. A hostess in a floor-length period gown gives the tour.

I had learned years ago when touring the mansions in Newport, Rhode Island that the pineapple was a symbol of welcome, worked into newel posts in stairways and in wood carvings above doorways. The Oak Alley hostess pointed out that, if houseguests after a while were overstaying their welcome, a second pineapple were served, and it was a hint that the welcome was over. From experiences, I’ve found that guides often quote information they themselves have learned from visitors, so afterward I pointed out a similar story, which she seemed glad to hear, the one explaining the original meaning of “cold shoulder”. Houseguests would be served hot meals of, say, a shoulder of pork or veal, but when the house visit got too long, the cold dinners were served instead, and the guests were “given the cold shoulder”.

LAURA Laura was quite different. It calls itself a creole sugar plantation, built in 1805. It is less of a mansion and more of a cottage-with-office. Its ground-floor level is secondary, since you go up a double staircase to the upper level, which is primary. Its restoration is in the original, bright creole colors, with yellow predominating. It is another plantation that was run principally by women, as its name indicates.

NOTTOWAY The final stop of the day, and also where I would spend the night, was Nottoway Plantation House, named after the original owner’s birthplace, Nottoway County in Virginia, SW of Richmond. At 53,000 square feet / 4,924 square meters, it is the largest plantation home in the South, an ornate white mansion (1859) with 64 rooms, particularly notable for its large ballroom, also in white. I took the last tour of the day, and it was odd to see the room I’d be staying in included in the tour. In the upstairs hall there were several floor-to-ceiling windows that opened vertically on counterweights to become doors. From the upstairs gallery you could see over the levee (which I later climbed) to the Mississippi.

Nottoway was also one of the many houses that had a garçonnière. It was the (rather peculiar) custom of the time to isolate teenage boys from the rest of the family in a separate, usually quite isolated, wing of the house. Since garçon means “boy” (also “waiter”), this wing was called a garçonnière, which I suppose you could translate as “boys’ house”. Sons starting at about age 15 were moved here from the main building. I would suspect that modern thinking would say that’s probably the worst time to isolate teenagers, but ...

As other visitors left, I checked into my room. On the website, I’d asked for Room One, called Cornelia’s Room, after one of the original daughters. If your room is one of the two on the standard tour, you’re told you can occupy it after 5 and have to be out by 9. My room was on the third floor, and easily overlooked the river. It was a huge, high-ceilinged room that had a mahogany four-poster double bed that was so high, you needed to use the upholstered stool to get up into it. What had been a dressing room had been discretely converted into a bathroom. A flagon of sherry was brought to me to start my evening. It felt unusual to be spending the night in what had been a home but was now a museum, but, fear not, I was up to the challenge, and soaked in all the atmosphere.

Another advantage of spending the night here was that you could wander the house after closing time, which seemed rather illicit, like being left in the toy store on your own after closing. I did so, at which point I met some of the other guests. And therein lies a tale.

I had originally wanted to book both nights I’d be in the area in Nottoway, but was told there’d be a wedding the second day, a Saturday. All in all, it was for the best, since this way, I could also spend a night in Madewood, on Bayou Lafourche. But I was surprised on arrival to find that ALL of the 16 or so other guests this night would be people attending the wedding the next day, including the bride and groom. Wandering the house, I met the groom as well, and I asked him how they were going to set up the wedding in the ballroom.

Although breakfast (in a small basement room) is included in Nottoway, dinner is not, but there is a modern restaurant in the back of the grounds. When I went to dinner in the vast restaurant, the wedding party had gathered at a large table across the room. However, after a while, the groom came over and asked me to join the others, which was a very gentlemanly thing to do. They turned out to be a very interesting group of people, and we talked all evening; after the restaurant closed, we chatted on the porch of the garçonnière, where most of them were staying.

Although I was sure that there would be toasting, I asked the groom at dinner if I could offer my own toast without stepping on anyone’s toes. I stood and offered the traditional Spanish toast (with explanations):

I had used this publicly only once before, the only time I was Best Man, a quarter-century ago at my cousin’s wedding in Nashville. The peseta, the Spanish currency before the Euro, here represents wealth. Fruta is “fruit”, and disfrutar is “to get the fruits of”. So it could be in English a wish for:

They seemed to appreciate it.

SAN FRANCISCO The second day on the River Road saw me cross to the north bank again for San Francisco and Houmas House. San Francisco is another case of people having to struggle to save a house, since they wanted to put the road right through the building. Now San Francisco sits rather close to River Road, but the road bends around it, and close to the levee. It’s from 1856, and is one of the most distinctive in that it’s in Steamboat Gothic style, in imitation of the many steamboats going up and down the river. As a matter of fact, from the gentleman’s parlor upstairs, wealthy men would check out steamboats going to, or coming from, New Orleans, to see if there was one they might like to purchase.

And then there was the mixture of centuries. I had a solo tour, and the young hostess was in period costume, in a floor-length gown. As we started to go upstairs, she scooped up her skirts to reveal the jeans and sneakers she was wearing underneath. When I laughed “Are you wearing jeans!?”, she laughed as well.

The name of the house also has a story. It seems there’s a French expression that I hadn’t heard of before: tout le saint-frusquin (tu luh sæ[ng] früs.KÆ[NG]), which is the equivalent of “the whole caboodle”. When the owner’s wife undertook a lavish restoration, he said it cost him all his money, the whole caboodle. Non-French speakers hearing “saint-frusquin” didn’t understand it and, through the process we call folk etymology, “thought” they might be hearing something more familiar that sounded like San Francisco, which is what it became.

HOUMAS HOUSE Almost as impressive as Oak Alley was Houmas House Plantation (“Houm-” sounds like “Home”; Houmas is an Indian tribe). It’s surrounded by beautiful gardens. An older four-room 1790 house in the back is paired with an 1840 mansion in the front, complete with Greek Revival columns. A great deal of money has gone into the restoration of this building, which is filled with beautiful pieces, and the current owner, an Australian, frequently lives there. Since we were looking at his (“non-period”) laptop on an antique desk, I suspect he takes over once the tours leave, like I did at Nottoway. There is a display about Bette Davis, since she filmed “Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte” in Houmas House in 1963.

In the last room, a historic kitchen, the gowned hostess was demonstrating some tools. One thing she picked up was a flax break and she clawed the air with it, trying to explain what it was, something that clearly she wasn’t too sure of. Once again, as people were leaving, I took her aside and gave her the story, which I had learned once touring a property of Historic Hudson Valley.

Flax is a grass. The threads of flax run down the center of the blade, and the outer shell of the blade needs to be broken away. A flax break is a very simple implement that looks something like a hairbrush on drugs. It’s a piece of wood that fits in the palm of the hand like a brush, but in place of bristles, has several rows of very long, primitive nails sticking upward. One doesn’t claw with it. You hold it flat on the table, nails up, take a bunch of flax in your fist, like holding uncooked spaghetti, and flail the blades of flax onto the nails of the break, then pull. Rather quickly, broken outer pieces of the flax collect in a chaotic mass among the nails—this is called the tow (as in towing). At the same time, you find the now processed flax flowing out of your fist, looking like blond hair.

Simple enough, but it’s the words we derive from this that I enjoy. Looking at your hand, you see where we get the expression “flaxen-haired girl”, and looking at the mess in the break, you see what a “tow-headed boy” is. As for the expressions, why do males always get the short end of the stick?

MADEWOOD I crossed the Mississippi again to the south side, the Bayou Lafourche side, and in twenty minutes I went through Napoleonville on the bayou, and arrived at Madewood Plantation House (1846), the only one I visited not on the Mississippi except, of course, Shadows-on-the-Teche. There is no levee on the Lafourche, so the Bayou was on one side of the road and the house on the other, the way the ones on the Mississippi used to be. Madewood exudes a quiet elegance that not too many plantation houses show. It seems less like a museum and more like a home, which is why it was especially good to spend the night there. It shows six splendid Ionic columns to the Bayou, with the requisite two galleries, and with two smaller lateral wings, one housing the library and ballroom, and the other having served as the former garçonnière. I took the next-to-last tour of the afternoon. There were a number of elegant rooms downstairs, a beautiful dining room, and large central hall. It was at Madewood where I saw the paintings by Clementine Hunter. The couple who own and restored the building come and stay in the garçonnière wing regularly. Madewood was also a sugarcane plantation, and its fields are still used by others for cultivation. Many of the plantation houses are either wooden, or have extensive wood in their construction, and most often, it’s cypress wood, which is hard and impervious to insects. For that reason, just about all of the ancient virgin cypress trees from this area are now gone. In any case, Madewood was constructed from cypress taken from the property, which gave it its name: it’s MADE with WOOD from the grounds.

I walked down across the lawn and road to the bayou, where there was a little floating dock to stand on and watch the water go by. A picture at Madewood showed an early 20C steamboat coming up the bayou back when sufficient water was still allowed to exit the Mississippi to keep the bayou deep enough.

Online I had chosen the Master Bedroom as the one I wanted for the night. It was again, high-ceilinged and huge. The canopied bed was almost as high as the night before, but without a step to get up into it. The room was in the front of the house, and included one of those tall windows that lifted upward on counterweights to become a doorway, so I spent some quality time in the late afternoon, sitting in a wicker chair reading on the upper gallery on the front of Madewood, between the tops of the huge Ionic columns, looking across the lawn to Bayou Lafourche and the sunset. This was idyllic.

Breakfast was included, and dinner was optional, and I took it. The whole experience at Madewood was more complete, since everything took place right in the rooms of the building, not in the basement or an outside restaurant. I was hoping for company; there were two couples staying the night, but only one was coming to dinner, so we were three for dinner, but five for breakfast.

At 6:00 there was first wine and cheese in the library, and time to chat. Then dinner was announced by the cook at 6:30, and the three of us set down to a set-menu candlelight dinner in the dining room. The homemade dinner was exquisite. There was a bell on the table to tell the cook we were finished with each course. After dessert, she opened the twin pocket doors leading to the parlor, where we were served brandy and coffee. Conversation the next morning at the excellent breakfast, also in the elegant dining room, was just as invigorating.

As much of interest happened on this Louisiana trip in just 16 nights as happens on many of my 5-6-week trips, as shown by the need to do three separate write-ups for Louisiana. Visiting New Orleans and dining there was great fun (did I mention there was a Mardi Gras going on?), then there was Avery Island, Tabasco, New Iberia, Evangeline, Saint Martinville, all the plantation houses, including staying in two of them overnight. But the experience of staying at Madewood was a wonderful end to it all.