Oak Alley Plantation

The oaks belong to an earlier century; the pecans belong to Antoine. He was a gardener held by Jacques Roman, who owned 113 people here, 93 of them field laborers, and whose ledger valued Antoine at $1,000. In the 1840s, after a neighbor's pecan grafts kept failing, Antoine grafted trees from that neighbor's best pecan; sixteen early grafts took, and he went on to graft 126 trees. In 1876 the estate's pecans were shown at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition and the variety was called Centennial. The exhibitor got the certificate. Antoine's name is not on it.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Whitney Plantation — 7.9 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.
• Wetlands Acadian Cultural Center — 15 mi
  A Jean Lafitte National Historical Park center on Bayou Lafourche with Acadian and bayou-life exhibits, a 200-seat theater and ranger-guided boat tours to the E. D. White house.
• E. D. White Historic Site — 15 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.
• Laurel Valley Village — 15 mi
  A sugar plantation's workers' village south of Thibodaux, with cabins of about 1845, shotgun houses, a store and cemetery, and the 1887 strike and massacre in the parish around it.

More markers nearby

• James Mather — 1.1 mi
• "Le Petit Versailles" Historical Marker — 1.3 mi
• Bourgeois Homeplace / Site Familial des Bourgeois — 2.3 mi
• Colonel Leopold L. Armant Historical Marker — 2.5 mi