Oak Alley Plantation
Greek Revival mansion framed by centuries-old live oaks, built and worked by enslaved laborers.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to Oak Alley Plantation in New Orleans opens with a question about whose hands actually built the fortune here: not Jacques Telesphore Roman, whose name is on the 1837 deed, but the nearly two hundred enslaved people who worked the sugar plantation and raised its columns. It follows one of them, a gardener named Antoine, valued in estate papers at one thousand dollars, and the task Roman handed him in 1846: grafting a twig from a neighbor's prized pecan tree, something that had never been reliably done before. Walk past the reconstructed cabins behind the mansion, rebuilt in 2013 near where the originals stood.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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