Ashland

Ashland is remembered for its mansion, but excavations in 1989 and 1992 found the working plantation: a sugar house, an overseer's house, a blacksmith shop and the traces of 18 cabins where enslaved families lived. When the war ended, the Freedmen's Bureau confiscated the estate in 1865, and Duncan Kenner got it back in 1866 after swearing allegiance to the Union. The property was auctioned in 1889 for $85,100, and the new owner renamed it Belle Helene after his daughter. Shell bought it in 1992.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• LSU Rural Life Museum — 18 mi
  Four slave cabins moved from Welham Plantation and a working-plantation row of more than twenty saved buildings, on land the Burden family held as Windrush plantation since the 1830s.
• Old State Capitol — 22 mi
  James Dakin's 1850 Gothic castle on the river bluff, gutted in the Civil War, nearly demolished in 1991 and reopened in 1994 as a free museum of political history.
• Capitol Park Museum — 22 mi
  The Louisiana State Museum in Baton Rouge: a shrimp trawler and a Civil War submarine, galleries on the slave market, resistance and Jim Crow, and the music from Armstrong to Chenier.
• Louisiana State Capitol — 22 mi
  A 450-foot Art Deco tower Huey Long pushed through in 1930, finished in 14 months, and the hallway where he was shot in 1935; free to enter and ringed by 27 acres of grounds.

More markers nearby

• Abe Hawkins — steps away
• Bocage Plantation — 4.4 mi
• Houmas House — 4.5 mi
• Fort Butler African American Soldiers Memorial — 4.7 mi