Oakland Plantation (Depot Street)

Oakland began as Bermuda, and its head-counts show what cotton did. Tallies differ: 38 enslaved people in 1795, 145 about half a century later by one count, 104 at the founder's death in 1845 by another, and nearly 160 by the Civil War. In 1868 the heirs split the land, and Pierre Emmanuel's eastern half was renamed Atahoe. After emancipation the plantation store served freed people and tenant farmers and doubled as a post office for about a century. The family sold the core to the National Park Service in the late 1990s.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Natchitoches Historic District — 0.5 mi
  The riverfront blocks of the oldest permanent settlement in the Louisiana Purchase, founded in 1714 at a Natchitoches village, with a brick-paved Front Street, Cane River frontage and the largest bousillage construction in the South.
• Fort St. Jean Baptiste State Historic Site — 0.7 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.
• Cane River Creole National Historical Park — 8.6 mi
  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.
• Los Adaes State Historic Site — 12 mi
  The Spanish presidio that was the capital of Texas from 1729 to 1770, some 15 miles from French Natchitoches, now an archaeological site where Native pottery is the most abundant find.

More markers nearby

• The Great Migration (Natchitoches Depot) — steps away
• Architecture of Segregation — steps away
• Natchitoches residents fought hard for civil rights — steps away
• The Texas and Pacific Railroad Depot — steps away