Prud'homme, Jean Pierre Emmanuel, Oakland Plantation - Natchez, LA - U.S. National Register of Historic Places on Waymarking.com

Amazing. This was the best location I have visited. The tours were FREE, both guided and self walking. The tour guides were knowledgable, nice and friendly. The "big house" tour was guided. One can see the inside of a working plantation home and the way, as necessity dictated, the additions/remodels to home. The self walking tours you can visit the Plantation store, overseers home, barns, and other out buildings. A really great visit and highly recommended.

There is plenty of information found about the home, but I'll take a small amount from both the register application, located here and from the Historical Society page, located here.

The founder of Oakland was Pierre Emmanuel Prud’homme, a second-generation native of French descent. With his wife Catherine Lambre, he established Bermuda Plantation, as it was originally known, on a land grant on the Red River. The present main house was completed in 1821. Like many local Creole homes it is raised on brick piers and made of bousillage on lathe between posts. Many of the plantation’s outbuildings also date to the first half of the nineteenth century—among them are two pigeonniers (dovecotes), an overseers’ house, a massive roofed log corn crib, a carriage house, a mule barn that was originally a smokehouse, a carpenter’s shop, and cabins.
By the early 1800s, cotton was becoming Bermuda’s main cash crop, the labor of a growing slave community fueling its expansion. The Prud’hommes stayed in the forefront agriculturally, experimenting with crops, equipment, and techniques as much of the antebellum South moved toward a one-crop economy.
After the Civil War, farming continued under new conditions. Many of Bermuda’s freed workers remained at or near the plantation, at first because the Union commander at Natchitoches ordered them to. In time, though, they worked the fields under Freedman’s Bureau labor contracts, then as sharecroppers or tenant farmers. Some, like Bermuda’s longtime blacksmith Soloman Williams, negotiated separate bargains for higher pay and a different work schedule. A plantation commissary replaced the issuing of rations with a central location to buy supplied on credit against a year’s harvest.
In 1873, two Prud’homme brothers partitioned the plantation, renaming the portion on the right bank Oakland while the portion on the left bank was renamed Atahoe. Both Prud’homme and laborers’ descendants occupied and farmed the plantation until late in the twentieth century, continuing a relationship with the site spanning three centuries.
In 1998, Oakland Plantation was acquired by the National Park Service.
From the register application
Oakland Plantation is of national significance in the areas of architecture and agriculture. It is of architectural significance as one of the nation’s most complete expressions of the rural French Creole building tradition. It is significant in the history of American agriculture as one of a very limited number of large plantation complexes remaining in the South. The period of significance under agriculture spans from 1818, the date of the original portion of the main house, to 1950, the Register’s current fifty year cutoff. (Oakland continued to operate as a cotton plantation up to and past this date.) The period of significance under architecture spans from 1818, the date the main house began, until the mid-nineteenth century, the date of the youngest buildings contributing to the property’s French Creole character.

Street address: 4386 LA HWY 494 Approximately 3 miles southeast of Natchez on La. Highway 19 Natchez, LA USA 71456 County / Borough / Parish: Natchitoches Year listed: 1979 Historic (Areas of) Significance: Architecture/Engineering, Event Periods of significance: 1800-1824 Historic function: Agriculture/Subsistence, Domestic. Sub - Agricultural Outbuildings, Single Dwelling Current function: National Historic Park Privately owned?: no Hours of operation: From: 8:00 AM To: 5:00 PM Primary Web Site: [Web Link] Secondary Website 1: [Web Link] Season start / Season finish: Not listed Secondary Website 2: Not listed National Historic Landmark Link: Not listed

Visit Instructions:
Please give the date and brief account of your visit. Include any additional observations or information that you may have, particularly about the current condition of the site. Additional photos are highly encouraged, but not mandatory.

Recent Visits/Logs:

Date Logged Log User Rating   06/07/2016 Dory The Explorer visited it 01/01/2015 Benchmark Blasterz visited it 04/13/2009 JediMasterAilshie visited it

View all visits/logs