Historical Marker
Belle Grove Plantation
White Castle, Iberville County · Louisiana
More than 150 people, mostly enslaved, worked Belle Grove in the 1850s, and their labor made over half a million pounds of sugar a year. John Andrews, a Virginia planter holding more than 7,000 acres across several plantations, spent $80,000 on a mansion built between 1852 and 1857 while they cut and ground the cane. After the war he sold the house and land in 1868 for $12,000. The Ware family kept it for 65 years. The wealth in those columns came from the quarters, not the parlor, and the house itself burned in 1952.
Where it stands
30.18573, -91.12008 · Directions
Worth the stop nearby
- LSU Rural Life Museum — 16 miFour 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 — 18 miJames 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 — 19 miThe 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 — 19 miA 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.