Houmas House

Sugar made the Houmas estate, and enslaved people made the sugar. Before the Civil War about 750 of them were held here, the largest slaveholding in Louisiana by one account. Wade Hampton bought Daniel Clark's land and enslaved workers together in 1811. John Burnside, a bachelor from Belfast, bought the estate in 1857, expanded it to 12,000 acres and built four sugar mills to process the crop. The name recalls the Houma people, whose land on the east bank Latil and Conway took over in 1774. The mansion is the showpiece today, but the fields carried the work.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Whitney Plantation — 18 mi
  A museum on a former sugar plantation along the River Road that tells its story through the people who were enslaved there, with memorials to 107,000 enslaved Louisianans and 2,200 children.
• LSU Rural Life Museum — 22 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.
• E. D. White Historic Site — 22 mi
  A National Historic Landmark house of about 1790 on Bayou Lafourche, built by enslaved people and home to two Whites, a governor and a Chief Justice, with an exhibit on the bayou's history.
• Tickfaw State Park — 25 mi
  A floodplain park on the Tickfaw River, with cypress-tupelo swamp, bottomland hardwoods and about 4.75 miles of trails and boardwalks, plus a nature center with an 800-gallon river aquarium.

More markers nearby

• Bocage Plantation — 1.7 mi
• Tezcuco Plantation — 2.2 mi
• Ascension Of Our Lord Catholic Church — 3.8 mi
• Historic Donaldsonville — 3.9 mi