By Monique Roth
L’Observateur

WALLACE — Opened to the public on Dec. 8 for the first time in its 262-year history, the Whitney Plantation on the west bank of St. John the Baptist Parish is the only plantation museum in Louisiana focused on telling the story of slavery. 

Visitors can expect to experience the world of an antebellum sugar plantation through the testimonies of the slaves who built and worked on plantation properties, with seven slave cabins, the last surviving French Creole barn in the United States, the oldest detached kitchen in Louisiana, first-person slave narratives and a fully-equipped blacksmith shop throughout Whitney’s hour and a half tour.

The plantation, which was the home of the Haydel family of German immigrants and the slaves that built it, hosted a field trip group of 55 fifth and sixth grade students from East Iberville Elementary on its opening day.

Tour guide Trixie LeBlanc said one particular visiting student did something she’ll never forget, as she emotionally recounted the story of that student approaching owner John Cummings and thanking him personally for his work at the plantation.

For Cummings, opening the Whitney Plantation has been a labor of love, and money, for the past 15 years.

Cummings has over $7 million personally invested into the venture, Director of Museum Operations Ashley Rogers said, adding the 15-year time frame of purchasing the property, working on the grounds, bringing in buildings, constructing monuments and now being open for tours is “remarkable” given the fact she’s seen much smaller projects around the country take much longer in relation to the huge undertaking in Wallace.

The amount of effort, money and time Cummings has poured into the project hasn’t gone unnoticed, including by those who may question the reasons why he would take on the project.

“You have a rich white man opening a slavery museum,” Rogers said of Cummings, a retired trial lawyer and real estate developer. “Of course people are going to ask why.”

She added the response to the project, however, has been “overwhelmingly positive,” especially after people visit.

“People come here and get the actual history of slavery,” Rogers said. “Understanding slavery is critical to understanding this nation. We (as a museum) are less about what happened on these grounds and more about what happened in a slave’s life.”

With that goal, Rogers said Cummings brought slave cabins and a jail cell to the grounds of the Whitney Plantation in an effort to tell the complete story of the slave experience. A museum installation dedicated to the history of slavery in Louisiana will open in February in conjunction with Black History Month, and another building brought to the plantation grounds is that of Paulina’s Antioch Baptist Church, which Rogers said was built by freed slaves.

Rogers said the church is “significant to Louisiana’s African American history,” adding not too long ago a woman drove onto the plantation grounds inquiring about the church’s location and condition.

When Rogers told the visitor official tours hadn’t started yet, the lady asked if she could step inside the church — the church she was married in — to see the results of the massive undertaking Cummings took in restoring it. Rogers obliged.

“We just stood here and cried,” Rogers said as she stood in the church’s aisle telling the story of her and the visitor.

Hauntingly realistic ceramic statues of slave children fill the front of the church, which Rogers said was done to “give a face to the slave children.”

Because a lot of the country’s history on slavery is based on oral history, especially from the eyes of the children who lived and worked on the country’s plantation homes and were later freed, their stories are particularly poignant, Rogers said.

The Field of Angels — a monument which lists the names of 2,200 St. John Parish child slaves who died at the average age of 3 — is another solemn stop on the Whitney Plantation’s tour, as are two tour stops which list adult slaves’ names, including slaves who worked on the Whitney Plantation’s grounds.

A tour of the Big House — which serves as an exquisite example of Spanish Creole architecture and is one of the earliest raised Creole cottages in Louisiana — ends the tour, and is notably entered into through the back of the house because “that’s the way the slaves would have done it,” Rogers said.

Tour participants may catch a view of Cummings, who Rogers said regularly visits the grounds, as he drives around on a golf cart to monitor the daily events and view firsthand the reactions and emotions of people processing the heavy history.

She said she hopes the tours will serve as a “resource for schools who don’t know how to address the topic” of slavery, as well as an educational tool for anyone who visits the 250-acre site.

Located at 5099 River Road in Wallace, guided tours are offered from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., with the grounds only closed on Tuesday. For more information, visit whitneyplantation.com, call 225-265-3300 or email info@whitneyplantation.com.