Lucky Plantation House - Sunshine, LA
N 30° 17.150 W 091° 11.867
15R E 673334 N 3351833
Fine privately owned Greek Revival home, located in Eastern Iberville Parish. Almost at foot of Sunshine Ferry.
Waymark Code: WM57EH
Location: Louisiana, United States
Date Posted: 11/23/2008
Views: 9
Private home. At time of this waymarking, plantation was for sale! Very nice, clean grounds. It is on a state highway, but not too busy to locate and photograph.
I searched, and found alot of info on the real estate for this home, so here is a brief history I found at the register application ...
here .
buildings remaining in Iberville Parish, where once they would have been plentiful.
Straddling the Mississippi River below Baton Rouge, Iberville is one of Louisiana’s twelve original parishes created
in 1805. It was initially settled in the French colonial period, but particularly grew and prospered in the antebellum era.
The principal livelihood was the growing and processing of sugar cane. In the boom years prior to the Civil War, Louisiana
sugar planters were among the wealthiest of the wealthy. The fine residences they built were, of course, in the wildly
popular Greek Revival style. Other examples of the style would have been found in Plaquemine, the parish seat, and the
only town of any size.
The number of Greek Revival buildings produced during this architectural “flowering” will never be known. Clues
can be found in the census schedules of 1860, with slaveholding being a commonly accepted indicator of wealth. On the
eve of the Civil War, there were seventy-six large slaveholdings (fifty or more slaves) in Iberville Parish. Only two involved
absentee owners. In addition, there were numerous good size plantations with slaveholdings of less than fifty. Given the
foregoing, it is clear that the waterways of the parish (two banks of the Mississippi and bayous) were once lined with
plantation houses, from large mansions to smaller galleried houses like Lucky. While some may have been holdovers
from the French Creole period, virtually all the rest would have been in the Greek Revival style. The parish seat of
Plaquemine on the eve of the Civil War would have had numerous Greek Revival buildings.
Of the perhaps 100-200 Greek Revival buildings that must have once been in Iberville, today there are roughly 20
survivors. A historic structures inventory done in 1984 recorded 894 buildings which at that time were fifty years old or
older. The vast majority of these are extremely modest, including plantation quarters houses and other utilitarian
agriculture-associated buildings, unstyled cottages and shotguns, and simple folk bungalows. The principal exceptions to
the foregoing are the town of Plaquemine, with its 129 building National Register district, and a few remaining plantation
houses (all but two of which are Greek Revival).
Of the roughly 20 surviving examples of the Greek Revival taste, most are galleried cottages. Several of these are
located in the Plaquemine historic district and are roughly the same size or smaller than Lucky. Only four of the Greek
Revival residences would be considered superior in quality to Lucky (because of their size and more “high style” details).
The only non-residential Greek Revival building, and also the parish’s only example of the Greek temple form, is the
former Plaquemine City Hall.