By LEONARD GRAY / L’Observateur / May 9, 1999

WALLACE – Evergreen Plantation will soon become the site of an archaeological dig by students from Southeastern Louisiana University.

A summer course in archaeology, taught by Dr. Scott Simmons, willexamine small mounds behind the unique double row of slave cabins at the rear of the 1786 River Road plantation. The course runs May 17-June 1.The course, which will include in-class instruction and on-site field excavations, is for anyone interested in Louisiana history, plantation archaeology and learning about field methods and techniques used by modern archaeologists, including mapping and electronics.

“We’re looking for this to be an ongoing project,” Evergreen manager Jane Boddie said.

The double row of 22 slave cabins face each other across an avenue of oaks. All but two are double-family occupancy cabins, and the remainingare four-plexes which, Boddie advised, were possibly used for hospitals for male and female patients among the slaves.

The row once included a church for the slaves, which continued to be used by descendants at least until the 1920s but was knocked down in 1965 by Hurricane Betsy. All the cabins now have tin roofs but are otherwiseunrestored, as required by the National Register of Historic Places.

The mounds behind the slave cabins are believed to be refuse piles, the contents of which could reveal much of how slaves in antebellum Louisiana lived.

“The slave quarters area was chosen for investigation at the request of the folks who run Evergreen Plantation,” Simmons said. “They would liketo know much more about slave life at Evergreen, and archaeology can help that quite a lot.”Boddie commented, “As we’ve always said, we’re not going to talk about what we don’t know about.”The slave cabins were, after the Civil War, used for several decades by tenant farmer families, former slaves, to work the sugarcane fields. Thatthey continue to exist at all, nearly 150 years after the fall of the South, was termed by Simmons as “quite unusual.”Evergreen Plantation, located on River Road between Wallace and Edgard, has 39 buildings on the National Register of Historic Places and, says Boddie, is the most complete plantation complex in the Deep South. It wasopened to tourism for the first time last November.

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