Poplar Grove Plantation

The big house at Poplar Grove was never meant to be a home. Architect Thomas Sully designed it as the Banker's Pavilion for the 1884 Cotton Centennial in New Orleans, and in 1886 Joseph L. Harris had it barged up the Mississippi, where an unusually high river helped carry it over the levee. A short way downriver a few collapsing cabins remain from the plantation's workforce; about fifty still housed tenants in the mid-1960s. German prisoners of war from the Port Allen camp cut cane here in the 1940s, and the Wilkinson family ran the sugar business until 1982.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Louisiana State Capitol — 2.7 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.
• Capitol Park Museum — 2.9 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.
• Old State Capitol — 3.3 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.
• LSU Rural Life Museum — 7.7 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.

More markers nearby

• Sunrise — 1.1 mi
• Dr. Julia Brogdon Purnell — 1.9 mi
• Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback — 1.9 mi
• Scott's Bluff — 2.0 mi