In southern Louisiana, along the misty, turbulent lower Mississippi, can be found some of the most evocative relics of the American past. These plantation houses—a few preserved, but most in ruins now, nearly hidden by the humid lushness of cypress and hanging moss—are what remain of the last great non-urban culture in the United States.

This was a culture that reached its apogee in the 1840’s and 50’s, a culture that rested on a triangular base formed of slavery, sugar, and cotton. The affluent planters, employing sometimes hundreds of slaves, carved out great fields of cane and cotton from the wilderness along the Mississippi. The great houses they raised helped create an undying legend of the antebellum South.

Now only the legend and the poetry are left. The culture began to crumble with the Civil War. First to fall was the vital structure of slavery. In the next twenty years both the sugar and cotton markets sagged in the face of international competition. Finally, industrialism wrought its great changes in the social structure, in land ownership, in wealth. Most of the planters floundered, and then failed. The plantations were broken up, the mighty houses fell into disrepair. The heavy hand of weather, verdant nature, and fire did the rest. In less than a century this culture was born, flourished, and died.

The plantation houses, architecturally speaking, fall roughly into two periods. The first. Colonial, nourished in the Eighteenth Century and up to about 1820. The style, as befitted the nationality of the early Louisiana settlers, was based on French Provincial. Usually two stories high with a covered gallery the houses had walls of cement-covered brick, with columns up to the second story. The upper level had cypress beams and handcarved colonettes, with a long-sloping shingle roof.

By the 1820’s, however, fortunes were being made. Out of Colonial grew a new and more magnificent architecture called Louisiana or Creole Classic. This great style had undeniable Greek Revival and Georgian influences, but was shaped by the peculiar environment. By the 1840’s buildings appeared that were entirely indigenous, dominated by Louisiana characteristics, and built on a Louisiana plan with Louisiana materials. In many ways they embodied the most original architecture evolved anywhere in this country during the Nineteenth Century.

Such a house was roughly square in form, with a tremendous hipped rool and a great attic for insulation against the heat of the sun. Melow were two floors with walls of brick, and huge central halls running straight through the house. All the rooms—large, high-ceilinged, usually four to a floor—opened onto the central halls and also onto the deep galleries that encircled the house. Maximum cross ventilation, so vital in the semitropical climate, was thus insured, since the deep galleries meant that only in the early morning and late afternoon could the fierce sunlight enter the rooms. They were deep enough, too, to allow the jalousies to be kept open during the heavy Louisiana