Old Hickory

Old Hickory was a working plantation, and the records count the people who worked it. Zenon Ledoux Sr. held 14 enslaved people when he owned the land in the 1790s, his son held 24 by 1850, and Ovide Lejeune held 77 in 1860. The raised Creole house was probably built by the younger Ledoux in the 1830s or 1840s. After the Ledoux sale in 1850, six owners followed in about a generation, and later the building served as a school for Black students from 1936 to 1957.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Louisiana State Penitentiary Museum — 9.3 mi
  The Angola museum outside the penitentiary gate, opened in 1997 on the history of crime and punishment in Louisiana, on ground where convicts were leased out as what 64 Parishes calls legal slave labor.
• Rosedown Plantation State Historic Site — 14 mi
  A cotton plantation worked by hundreds of enslaved people, whose names survive in an 1862 succession list; the Turnbull house and gardens, and the quarters nobody has yet found.
• Audubon State Historic Site — 17 mi
  Oakley House, where Audubon taught drawing and painted 32 birds in 1821, and the two cabins behind it where four Black families lived through slavery, Reconstruction and Jim Crow.
• Port Hudson State Historic Site — 21 mi
  The 48-day siege of 1863 on the Mississippi bluffs, where the Louisiana Native Guards and Captain Andre Cailloux led the first assault; earthworks, a six-mile trail and a museum.

More markers nearby

• John Archer Lejeune — 0.3 mi
• Mississippi River — 2.5 mi
• Former Site of Melancon's Cafe — 6.0 mi
• St. Stephen's Episcopal Church and Cemetery — 6.3 mi