Adventures in the Villa

We boarded the bus again for our ride back to Baton Rouge…

Our first stop was the Rural Life Museum, run by Louisiana State University.  It is on land that was originally a plantation; the family which owned the land donated it to preserve a record of plantation and rural life in Louisiana.  While the buildings on display are not original to this plantation, they were moved here from nearby plantations and restored.  The museum exhibits and the buildings were very interesting.  Our tour guide knew EVERYTHING about these buildings, and he was intent on telling us everything he knew… It was a bit of a bore.  But I loved looking at the buildings…

My only disappointment was that thee was no Big House here – apparently the house that was slated to be moved here was demolished one week before the legislature voted for it to become an historic landmark… We will see a Big House in a few days, and maybe more after the caravan is over…

The museum is set in a plantation-like setting…

These are stone columns taken from a demolished library at LSU.  The scale is impressive.  They are solid, carved stone.  Many plantation houses had columns that looked like stone, but were, in fact, wood.  (IE:  Mt. Vernon…)  Why plantation owners had this perverse desire to live in the Parthenon escapes me, but I just love houses…

The museum exhibit rooms contained many impressive mid-19th century funeral coaches…

The exhibit room was mostly filled with old junk that people had sitting around their garage and that they wanted to get rid of; they jumped at the chance to donate it for a tax deduction…

The Commissary or “Company Store”…  Sharecroppers were paid in script that could only be spent at the company store…

The Overseer’s Home…  There were three classes of overseers: the professional overseer, who was in a social class similar to the plantation owner; the middle manager, often the owner’s son; and the hired hand, an itinerant farmer with little training or skills.

These buildings were wood framed; soft brick, made on-site, was used as infill for insulation.  It was either plastered over, or was covered with wood siding…

The kitchen…  This would usually be directly behind the Big House…

The Sick House, or slave hospital…  One room for examinations, one room for “lying in”…

Typical slave cabin…  Two rooms sharing a central chimney…

Blacksmith shop…

Single room slave cabin…

Sugar House…  Sugar cane was processed and boiled into sugar and molasses here.  Sugar Cane was a VERY lucrative crop, but its processing was VERY labor intensive.  There were over 1,000 sugar plantations in Louisiana before the Civil War.  Once the slaves were freed fewer than 100 sugar plantations remained…

This is a cane grinder…  The canes were ground up here, the husks were taken away and burned, and the pulp was sent to the Sugar House to be boiled into sugar and syrup…

Pioneer cabin…  This is for a yeoman farmer, in northern Louisiana who was not in the same class as a plantation owner, but who struck out on his own to make his living as a farmer…  Many of these farmers were Creoles – more on the difference between Creoles and Cajuns to come later…

Baptist Church, founded and built by ex-slaves in 1870; It was used until 1960, and former congregants still come here once per year for a “homecoming” style gathering…

Typical Acadian dwelling…  This one was built in 1805 and occupied until about 1960.  Note the exterior stairs to the attic sleeping loft…

Rather than bricks, the spaces between the wood framing were filled in with a mixture of mud, moss, horse hair, and manure… It was generally covered with plaster or wood siding…

Another Acadian dwelling; this one had three rooms front to back – a “shotgun” house…

A “Dog-trot” house has two rooms separated by a breezeway…

A barn…

Inside the museum is an artist’s expression of his feelings toward the legislature…

It was a fun place to visit – full of information about life in rural Louisiana in the 19th and early 20th centuries…

We were served a lunch of Jambalaya… Spicy rice with hearty smoked beef.  It was different than the seafood Jambalaya I was used to…

Back on the bus, we headed to the State Capitol – the tallest in the union…

There are 48 steps, one for each of the 48 States when the building was built.  Alaska and Hawaii have been added off to the side, starting new columns of names…  Who’s next?  The huge statue on the left depicts the founding fathers; on the right are the pioneers…

Inside the Grand Memorial Hall is all this beautiful marble.  These flags represent all the nations that have held sovereignty over Louisiana…

At the far end of the hall is a mural that is obscured in this photo by the chandeliers…

Here is a close-up of the mural.  I thought this was Louise, the woman they named the State after, but apparently it is not…

At either end of the hall is an antechamber with a stair for the legislative chambers… Very nice…

We were told of the bomb that was exploded in the Senate chamber in 1970.  The room has since been restored to its former glory…

We took the elevators to the 27th floor – the observation balcony… This is the Mississippi River, looking north-west…

Looking East we can see the Governor’s Mansion…

The industrial north-east…

Barges being pushed up-river…

We were shown to the hall outside the governor’s elevator where Huey Long was shot and killed.  They tried to make a case for some sort of mystery along with conspiracy theories;  I checked it out on-line and nothing they said holds any water.  He was killed by the son-in-law of a judge that Long had had disbarred… End of story…

We returned to the bus and to the Villa…

We had a drivers meeting – we are moving to a new RV park tomorrow…

Then we all car-pooled together to Pont Breaux Cajun Restaurant…

It was a real dive of a place, and we totally overwhelmed the wait staff… Even though we had called and told them that there would be 50 of us, somehow they were WAY under-staffed.  But the music was good, the food was OK, and…

…an enjoyable time was had by all…