Creole Architecture

A Louisiana Creole house is built to answer heat and flood. It stands a half to a full story off the ground for air and drainage, wrapped in wide galleries, framed in heavy cypress, its walls filled with bousillage. Each room opens to the gallery through French doors, there are no interior hallways, and doors and windows follow function rather than symmetry. Oakland's house of 1821 began as a parlour, dining room and two bedrooms, framed by enslaved carpenters that included Dominique Toussaint and Solomon Wilson. By the 1840s, such houses were adding Anglo-American symmetry and central halls.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Cane River Creole National Historical Park — steps away
  Oakland and Magnolia, two Cane River cotton plantations kept as they stood, told through the enslaved families who worked them, the 1864 and 1804 freedom seekers and the tenant farmers who stayed into the 1960s.
• Melrose Plantation — 5.0 mi
  The Cane River estate built on land granted to Louis Metoyer, son of Marie Thérèse Coincoin, with the Yucca House and African House, later an artists' retreat; guided tours Thursday to Sunday.
• St. Augustine Church, Isle Brevelle — 5.3 mi
  The parish church at the heart of the Cane River Creoles of color, begun by Augustin Metoyer on his family's land and still holding Mass for the community that grew from Marie Thérèse Coincoin's children.
• Fort St. Jean Baptiste State Historic Site — 7.8 mi
  A reconstruction of the 1716 French fort beside the Natchitoches village, with a palisade of nearly 2,000 pine logs, a chapel and storeroom, and living-history programs, open Wednesday to Sunday.

More markers nearby

• Working Iron — steps away
• The Enslaved Nanny's Room — steps away
• Hollywood Comes to Oakland Plantation — steps away
• The Helaire Family of Oakland / The Shields Family of Oakland — steps away