Destrehan Plantation

Destrehan Plantation on River Road in St. Charles Parish holds a courtroom story as well as a house. Robert Antoine Robin de Logny contracted Charles Pacquet to build the house in 1787, and it was finished in 1790. When de Logny died in December 1792, his son-in-law Jean Noël Destréhan bought the plantation at auction and moved it from indigo toward sugarcane.

In January 1811 enslaved people along the German Coast rose, beginning on the evening of January 8 at Manuel Andry's plantation upriver. Slaveholding judges tried the recaptured, and the busiest tribunal, five slaveholders, met at Destrehan; Jean Noël Destréhan himself sat on it. Of 21 captured people tried here, 18 were executed by firing squad, and Charles Deslondes, named as the revolt's leader, was seized from custody and killed without a trial. White residents put heads on poles along the levee, from Andry's plantation to the gates of New Orleans, more than thirty miles.

After the Civil War the Freedmen's Bureau set up the Rost Home Colony on the grounds. The Mexican Petroleum Company bought the property in 1914, and American Oil gave the house and four acres to the River Road Historical Society in 1971. The address is 13034 River Road. The tour covers the main house and an enslaved cabin, and the Miller-Haydel Museum holds an exhibit on the 1811 uprising and one on the Rost Home Colony and free people of color.