Melady House

Local belief makes this an antebellum house, but the architectural evidence points later. Machine-cut nails and stylistic details date it to roughly 1905 to 1910, and one reading is that an older dwelling was remodeled inside it. It was shaped to resemble a peripteral Greek Revival plantation house, with paneled, molded-capital columns across the front and one side, while the asymmetrical plan shows Queen Anne influence. The porch floor was later lowered and the columns shortened, and a glassed-in rear addition followed in the late 1940s or 1950s.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Kent Plantation House — 2.4 mi
  Rapides Parish's oldest known standing building, a Creole house with a February tour and a 2023 memorial that put the enslaved first.
• Forts Randolph and Buhlow State Historic Site — 3.7 mi
  Two Confederate earthen forts on the Red River at Pineville, built with enslaved labor and never attacked, beside the remains of Bailey's Dam.
• Arna Bontemps African American Museum — 4.2 mi
  The restored Alexandria house where the Harlem Renaissance writer Arna Bontemps was born in 1902, on the Louisiana African American Heritage Trail.
• Louisiana Maneuvers and Military Museum — 6.9 mi
  A National Guard museum in a replica WWII barracks at Camp Beauregard, built around the huge 1940-41 war games in Central Louisiana. Free.

More markers nearby

• England Air Force Base History — 1.2 mi
• Kent Plantation House — 2.5 mi
• Cook Home — 3.4 mi
• Deserting soldiers and the end of the war — 3.6 mi