Shadows-on-the-Teche

The Shadows was built between 1831 and 1834 on Bayou Teche as a townhome for sugar planters David and Mary Weeks. Enslaved people owned by the Weeks family built it, working under the carpenter James Bedell and the mason Jeremiah Clark. The family enslaved about 25 people at the house and about 200 at Grand Cote, the sugar plantation on what is now Weeks Island; by the Civil War they owned nine Louisiana plantations and had enslaved 1,112 people. The 1835 inventory of David Weeks's property lists husbands and wives as movable property, among them Amos and Patty and Isaac and Louisa.

Charity Polk was born enslaved at Grand Cote around 1820 to 1823 to a mother named Hannah, with siblings Mahala, Theorick and Maria. Moved to the Shadows by 1846, she worked as a domestic, gardener and seamstress, and bore at least thirteen children, three of them (Sidney, Charles and Charlotte) at the house. By 1870 she and her daughters lived in New Iberia near the Shadows; she died in 1900. An exhibit wall lists about 700 enslaved people identified by researchers.

William Weeks Hall, the family's great-grandson, restored the house from 1922 and left it to the National Trust in 1958. Tours led by a public historian cover enslaved life, labor and freedom. The site is at 320 E. Main Street, open Thursday to Saturday.