LSU Rural Life Museum

The Rural Life Museum keeps four slave cabins from Welham Plantation in St. James Parish, dating from the 1830s, and puts them in a row with an overseer's house, a commissary and a smithy. That is the museum's working-plantation section, which also holds a post office, an open-hearth kitchen, a sick house, a sugar house, a blacksmith's shop and a schoolhouse. An exhibit barn covers the Plantation South, slavery, Creoles, yeoman farmers, the Civil War, Reconstruction and the Industrial Revolution, and a Highsmith photograph at the Library of Congress describes one cabin as a slave and later tenant-farmer dwelling of about 1840.

The ground itself has the same history. The land was the Burden family's Windrush plantation from the 1830s, and the family gave it to LSU in 1964: Steele Burden with his brother Pike and sister Ione. Steele Burden began moving buildings here in 1970, and the museum says it has saved more than twenty from demolition. A folk-architecture section adds a split-cypress barn, a country church, a shotgun house, a dogtrot house and a jail. Windrush Gardens, which Burden began planting in 1921, covers 25 acres.

The museum is at 4560 Essen Lane. It opens daily at 8 a.m.; the visitor center and historic structures close at 4:30 p.m. and the grounds at 5 p.m. Admission is $12 for adults and $11 for seniors, as listed in 2026. It is closed New Year's Day, Easter Sunday, Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve and Christmas.