Restored tenant quarters at Magnolia Plantation, Cane River Creole National Historical Park

The Hertzog-LeComte Family used slave labor even before Cane River Creole National Historical Park’s Magnolia Plantation was founded sometime between 1835 and 1850. With the switch from growing tobacco, corn, and indigo to cotton in the early 1800s, the demand for slaves to pick the high-value crop skyrocketed. By the time the Civil War began, Ambrose Hertzog II, the founder of Magnolia Plantation, was the largest slave owner in Natchitoches with 235 slaves. He was also the area’s largest producer of cotton.

Owning slaves came with the responsibility of feeding and housing them, and at Magnolia Plantation there were once seventy slave houses spanning both sides of the Cane River. There are still eight such houses standing today, though none of these are the originals. These, along with many others, were built around 1845 as replacements. Most were made of wood, which is why they did not survive, but 24 were brick, and it is the brick structures that stand today. The fate of the missing 16 brick houses is unknown. Hertzog Family tradition claims that some of them were torn down in the 1890s to build the new Main House, for there were then more tenant houses than needed.

Remaining eight day-laborer houses at Magnolia Plantation, Cane River Creole National Historical Park

After the Civil War, the slave-labor system was replaced by the sharecropping and tenant farming system, and these workers and their families continued to occupy the existing housing. However, there were also day laborers employed on many plantations who worked as house servants, gardeners, and hired hands for general labor tasks. At Magnolia Plantation, it was the day laborers, mostly former black slaves, who lived in the brick houses that occupied an area known as The Quarters going back to before the Civil War. The sharecroppers and tenant farmers lived in housing along the river or near the plot of land they farmed—none of these houses exist today.

Prior to the Civil War when the houses were still occupied by slaves, each one was comprised of two-rooms and designed to house two families. After the Civil War when day laborers lived in the houses, each was converted into a single-family unit. Electricity was installed in 1946 but never running water.

Brick house built for slaves and later used by day laborers at Magnolia Plantation, Cane River Creole National Historical Park

The era of sharecropping and tenant farming in the South was on its way out following World War II. Mechanized farming equipment replaced large labor forces needed to harvest cotton, and the sharecroppers began heading north for better jobs. At Magnolia Plantation, the houses along the Cane River that the sharecroppers once occupied were soon empty, and they were eventually torn down so that modern tractors and cotton pickers could maneuver. Day laborers were still needed, and by the end of the 1950s, six of the brick houses at Magnolia were still occupied. However, even these jobs dried up over the next decade, and the very last family moved out of Magnolia housing in 1970.

One cabin at Magnolia Plantation has been restored and is open to the public. It is furnished as it might have been in the 1950s and 60s.

Interior of a day-laborer’s house at Magnolia Plantation, Cane River Creole National Historical Park

Interior of a day-laborer’s house at Magnolia Plantation, Cane River Creole National Historical Park

Old photos on display inside a day-laborer’s house at Magnolia Plantation, Cane River Creole National Historical Park

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