Buckner Mansion
Antebellum cotton-fortune mansion with a triple ballroom, built to outshine a rival's estate.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to Buckner Mansion in New Orleans centers on Josephine, a free woman of color who worked here as cook and housekeeper after slavery ended, while also serving the neighborhood as a midwife and herbal healer whose remedies made some call her a witch. It traces cotton merchant Henry Sullivan Buckner, who built the thirty-five-room mansion in 1856 to outdo a former business partner, and follows the house through its 1923 sale into a business school. Students there swore something in the kitchen refused to behave like an ordinary room. Stand near where that kitchen once stood and listen for yourself.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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