El Dorado Plantation House - Livonia, LA - U.S. National Register of Historic Places on Waymarking.com

Nice privately owned home. Located on a pretty busy state highway, so please be cautious. House appeared to be in VERY good condition. Located on a currently working sugar plantaion. Home is alos located very close to a large rail switching yard in the small town of Livonia, LA. Not much info found on internet. Here is excerpt from National Register application I located here.

The brick piers and chimney construction and the large beams running the width of the house are of historic interest. It is this writer's conviction that the original piers and beams have not been moved since first being built. From a construction-erection point of view, if the beams had been raised, all earlier brick work would have been cleaned out to allow for new consistent work; raising and then lowering of the beams would, too, have tended to crack any masonry they sat upon. It is common to find remnants of piers and other footings below grade under old buildings; and it is not unknown in the French Quarter of New Orleans to find portions of solid masonry incorporated into a later building, as in the Cabildo and Presbytere. Also, it is not unusual for earlier wood joists and beams to be reused in a later building; they are, however, easily identified by notches and sizes as having had different original construction uses. El Dorado is the only instance known to this writer's firm of such a clear case of an earlier building buried in and controlling the design of a later building. (The now lost Belmont Plantation, close by down the bayou, seems to have been a remodeling of a French type plantation, with extensive reuse of the old fabric.) The location of the chimney base within the building mass is typical of the Louisiana French Colonial tradition. One would suppose a tripped roof and galleries on the front, if not the sides. However, a probable construction date for these remnants does not fit comfortably into the titles. The mid-1830's would probably have been the last years when such a Creole type house would have been built, and had a building been on the land during the Cenas et al ownership or had such a house been built there in 1836 or so, it surely should have been reflected in the legal documents and in the prices, especially since a group of plantation buildings required for such a large scale operation as that suggested by the amount of land owned by Cenas et al would have been construction of significant cost and value. This strongly suggests an earlier building on land whose ownership has not been established by the title research to date. Given vestigial remains of an early house, it can be pointed out that in Pointe Coupee by the 1770's, the early frontier type of "poteau-en-terre" is used for secondary buildings, indicating an eighteenth century pier design for a main house is probable. (10) Examination of borings taken from the beams might yield dating information, and archaeological investigations of the upper portions of the building should be made. As for possible causes for the lack of a title, an interesting record describes the expropriation in 1815 of land along the west bank of the Mississippi, at the bend of Pointe Coupee, by the Pointe Coupee Police Jury which, because of a threatened flood, used it to build a levee, "which said works, they further allege, have proved a vast benefit to other parishes lying west of the Mississippi, preserving them from overflow, and thereby reclaiming large bodies of land." Although in modern times flooding came from the Atchafalaya on the west, flooding from the Mississippi might have caused an owner to abandon land and not be interested in maintaining its title (11) *The setting is an important part of El Dorado's architectural significance because the house can be seen from a distance and in its historic naturalistic environment. This adds much to the grandeur of the house. It also constitutes an integrity of setting in a plantation house which is rapidly disappearing as more and more rural areas of the state are being developed. The area is one of the few remaining which clearly evokes the agricultural world which produced these old plantation houses, which often exist solely as preserved structures in suburban or industrial settings.

Street address: Bayou Maringouin, LA 77 Livonia, LA USA 70755 County / Borough / Parish: Pointe Coupee Year listed: 1982 Historic (Areas of) Significance: Architecture/Engineering Periods of significance: 1825-1849, 1850-1874 Historic function: Domestic. Sub - Single Dwelling Current function: Domestic. Sub - Single Dwelling Privately owned?: yes Hours of operation: From: 9:00 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

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