In January of 2019 my family took a 4 day trip to New Orleans, Louisiana. You can read about the whole trip in my previous blog post. One of the highlights of the trip was visiting a plantation, which is the only one focused on the slaves of Louisiana. I had planned to write about this visit in my Lensbaby Blog Circle post prior to going there, and I decided on using my Burnside 35 lens. This is the Lensbaby lens that I grab for times when I am not by myself, but rather with my family. Since we were part of a large group, and there were areas where I could not have been able to stop and focus with my manual lens, I sometimes grabbed my phone to take additional pictures. I will be showing you images taken both with my Burnside lens and my phone (always noted) in this blog post.
The first owner of the plantation was Ambroise Heidel (at around 1752), whose family immigrated from Germany. They, among many other German immigrants, settled in the first German Coast (St. Charles Parish). The German Coast became a main food supplier to New Orleans. The Hayden Plantation turned into one of the most important sugar plantations in the State, and the owners one of the wealthiest people of the area. None of this could have happened without the extremely hard work of the enslaved African people they “owned” on their plantation.
