Indian Camp Plantation

Louisiana sent people with leprosy to a worn-out sugar plantation. The state passed a law in 1890 requiring confinement, and the first seven patients came by river barge on December 1, 1894. Their first homes were cabins built for enslaved workers, the same rows where cane had been cut a generation earlier. By 1896 the Home held 31 patients. The state bought the property outright in 1905 and replaced the cabins with twelve cottages and a dining hall. In 1999 the state took title back, and the ground now hosts a National Guard youth program.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• LSU Rural Life Museum — 15 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 — 18 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 — 18 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 — 18 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

• Administration Building, U.S. Public Health Service Hospital, Carville — steps away
• Cage Door of Harry T. Chimpanzee — steps away
• The STAR (Carville's Patient-Published Newspaper) — steps away
• The Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul — steps away