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.

The plantation received its currant name from Bradish Johnson, who bought it after the Civil War (1861-1865), and named it after his grandson, Harry Whitney. The museum’s founder is a trial attorney from New Orleans, John Cummings. It took him nearly 15 years to create the establishment which opened to the public in 2014.

We started our 90 minute tour at The Antioch Baptist Church, which was a donation from Paulina, LA in 2001. Inside the church we watched a short film about the plantation and the creation of the museum. We also encountered a few child statues inside the church (and more on the grounds). These statues are of 40 slave children by artist Woodrow Nash.

During the 1930s, over 2,200 former slaves were interviewed by the Works Progress Administration. In these interviews the former slaves, who were children during that time, were asked to recollect memories from the time they were still slaves, and the time following the Civil War. When you visit Whitney Plantation, you will learn about many of these people’s lives. At the beginning of the tour you’ll receive a name tag, representing one of the 40 children “present” at the plantation’s grounds. I received Mary Ann John’s, who is the girl in the corner of the above image. Let me share what she said (at age 85) in her recollections:

“I was ten years old when peace was declared … What I knows, I was borned with, for I never went to school a day in my whole life. I don’t know ‘A’ from ‘B’. One of my sisters was born right in de fields. Dey just dug two holes … She gets down in dat whole and gives birth to de baby and de baby just rolls out in the hole. Den de boss has someone to take the baby to de house, an’ makes my ma get up and keep right on hoeing; I never will forgit.”

I will not comment that… If you are interested in reading many other former slaves’ memories, one book I found – which includes Mary Ann John’s recollection as well – is Chained to the Land: voices from cotton & cane plantations, edited by Lynette Ater Tanner.

We continued our walk to The Wall of Honor, where the enslaved people’s names and information known about them is engraved in the granite wall.

At one of the stops we saw what sugar cane looks like and learned how hard the cultivation and manufacturing of sugar was. The cauldrons pictured above were used for the reduction of the sugarcane sap until it was ready to granulate.

After talking about the hard work the slaves had to do, we headed over to the Slave Quarters, where we saw how they lived. The building you see in the following images is one of the two original buildings, the other five were brought from a different plantation. The Whitney Plantation originally had 22 slave cabins, and they were located much farther from the big house than where they are found now.

This cabin, which had two rooms on each side (four together), housed 24 slaves.

Look at size of the rooms and its furniture. Can you imagine the living conditions?

The following images will show you the oldest outdoor kitchen in Louisiana, which was built in the late 18th century.

All the meals were prepared by an enslaved cook in this kitchen, which was then served in the Big House to the family.

I will finish my pictorial tour of the plantation with images from the Big House, built in the late 18th century. This is a raised French Creole style cottage, with a one room width. I learned during this trip that the buildings had very tall windows and doors, and many times just one room between the front and back of the building for cooling purposes. During the hot summers they would open all the windows and let the wind blow through the house to cool it down.

Only a few historic houses had decorative wall paintings on the outside, and this was one of them.

After the trip my husband and I decided to watch a movie that our plantation tour guide recommended, and I would also recommend it to everyone else who wants to learn a bit more about slavery. The movie’s title is: 12 Years a Slave.

I hope that I’ve given you enough insights into the Whitney Plantation Museum to make you want to visit it. If you are in the New Orleans area, I believe it’s a place you should check out. Their website has a lot of information about the place and slavery, I especially liked the Education page which has many short videos on it.

This post is part of a group of posts about Lensbaby related topics. At the beginning of each month we feature images and stories taken with our Lensbaby lenses, and link to each other. Next up in the blog circle is Seonaid Teal, please click this link to see her post and keep following the circle!