The Helaire Family of Oakland / The Shields Family of Oakland

James Helaire, born in 1930, taught school in Natchitoches and Winn Parishes for thirty-two years after serving in Korea. In a 2006 interview he described growing up on sharecropped land: his father farmed half the acreage for the owner and half for the family, and the family was paid once a year, after the cotton sold. Children chopped cotton for other farmers for about a dollar a day, and his mother saved the money in a coffee can for his college. He also recalled family accounts of an ancestor brought from Africa by ship and put to work.

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 — 4.9 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 — 5.2 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 — 7.9 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

• The Enslaved Nanny's Room — steps away
• Hollywood Comes to Oakland Plantation — steps away
• Creole Architecture — steps away
• Working Iron — steps away