White Hall Plantation House

The 1860 census counted 84 enslaved people at White Hall, who lived in 15 dwellings and grew cotton on the east bank of the Atchafalaya. Bennett Barton Simmes, who founded Simmesport, bought the plantation in 1852 from Samuel Norwood, and Norwood owned it again from 1880 to 1898. In May 1863 General Nathaniel Banks made the house his Union headquarters just before the Port Hudson campaign. Levee setbacks in 1912 and 1939 forced the house back from the river, and it opened to visitors in 2013 after about a decade of restoration.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Louisiana State Penitentiary Museum — 10 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.
• Tunica-Biloxi Museum — 19 mi
  The Tunica-Biloxi Tribe of Louisiana's own museum at Marksville, built around the Tunica Treasure that the tribe won back in court.
• Avoyelles Parish Courthouse: Solomon Northup Marker — 20 mi
  The Marksville courthouse where Solomon Northup was freed in January 1853, with a marker and a 2026 bronze that shows him rising from the mud.
• Rosedown Plantation State Historic Site — 27 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.

More markers nearby

• Buddy Guy — 3.1 mi
• Battle Of Yellow Bayou — 3.8 mi
• Birthplace of Buddy Guy — 5.6 mi
• A Historic Landmark — 6.3 mi