Slavery in Baton Rouge

Nancy Hall was the mother of twelve children, who was held as a slave here on Magnolia Mound, a cotton plantation in East Baton Rouge. She undertook an interview after she escaped, however it was vague and many of the details were omitted.... Read more

The antebellum South is memorialized by the symbols we create of both the plantation owners as well as their houses. Yet, this is deceiving as it creates an image of the South being abundant with the elite. This was not the case, in fac... Read more

Origins: Early settlers in East Feliciana Parish arrived in the town of Clinton in 1805 or 1806 while Louisiana was still under Spanish rule. Consequently, the Spaniard parliament only allowed Catholicism to be practiced, forcing the Baptis... Read more

The second courthouse of East Baton Rouge parish was constructed in 1857 and remained active until 1922. The plot of land that holds the current Baton Rouge City Court was once home to the second courthouse of East Baton Rouge. It was here,... Read more

Standing here now is Louisiana State University’s campus, but in the 1800’s, this would have been Gartness Plantation. Gartness Plantation existed through the Antebellum era of Louisiana and had four notable owners until it was consider... Read more

The Louisiana State Penitentiary was active from 1835 to 1862. Located in Baton Rouge it was one of the few prisons in the Antebellum South that housed children. As early as 1840, enslaved children were documented to have lived in the penit... Read more

The McHatton Home Colony was one of the (4) ex-slave refugee campus set up by the Freedman’s Bureau in Louisiana—an agency of the federal government with a mission to protect the rights of freed blacks—following union occupation in th... Read more

Through the romanticization of the antebellum plantations, residents of Baton Rouge are left with a misconstrued representation of the institution of slavery. Adelia at Old Goodwood is one of East Baton Rouge Parish’s last surviving plant... Read more

Of the many plantations in the Baton Rouge area, Allendale is one of the few plantations whose story is practically erased from history. Allendale planation is named after one of its many owners, Henry Watkins Allen. Henry Watkins Allen,1... Read more

The Daigre plantation was not the largest in East Baton Rouge; however, it is often forgotten about. Many people do not know that the Daigre plantation is right here on our very own Highland rd. only 0.8 miles from LSU’s campus, now locat... Read more

The Chasm of Disconnect Between Marketing and Truth of Antebellum Plantation Homes.  For far too many years people have had a misunderstanding of what truly happened on plantations. Let’s fix that. Plantation homes litter the Mississippi... Read more

The Chasm of Disconnect Between Marketing and Truth of Antebellum Plantation Homes.  Benett Barrow’s plantation was called Highland or Locust Grove Plantation and it was just outside of modern-day St. Francisville. Barrow was an avid dia... Read more

The Chasm of Disconnect Between Marketing and Truth of Antebellum Plantation Homes.  In the same way that Nottoway resort is a gross misrepresentation of history so is Magnolia Mound which is right here in Baton Rouge. At Magnolia Mound Pl... Read more

Harlem Plantation, situated in Plaquemines Parish Louisiana was built around the year 1820. It was a sugar and corn plantation, meaning the labor for the enslaved African Americans on this plantation was hard and intense. When the planta... Read more

By Alexander Aoun During the times of slavery, we learned that one way enslaved people tried to beat the system was running away to gain their freedom. For some this worked out, but sadly for others it was not as good an outcome as they wer... Read more

When did slavery end? Did it end in 1863 with the signing of the Emancipation proclamation? What if I told you that slavery didn’t end until the 1970s? There are documents from the Department of Justice that prove that slavery still exist... Read more

“A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots” ~ Marcus Garvey Today while many white Americans are able to trace their history back well into (or even beyond) the 19th century, m... Read more

Baton Rouge Slave Depot “When a master wishes to punish a slave, male or female, he will send that person to the jail with a note that contains the order for the number of the lashes that the jailer is to administer. The poor man or woman... Read more

As in any city, ‘downtown’ Baton Rouge is the commercial center of the city, and has been the central hub for the city’s life for the past 200 years. It has been shown how African American lives have been shaped by slavery in the Bato... Read more

The legacies of free, slave-holding, POC in Antebellum Louisiana is arguably one of the most overlooked, but also most intriguing aspects of slave-holding societies in Louisiana.  Throughout the Louisiana Antebellum era, up through the Ci... Read more