by Dr. Jay Edwards
By the end of French sovereignty, planters had successfully applied slave labor to the production of indigo, cotton and tobacco. Louisiana Jesuits had experimented with Malabar sugar cane, shipped to them by their brethren in Santo Domingo. In 1758, the planter Claude Dubreuil initiated the first commercially successful experiments with sugar. Sufficient wealth was available for the construction of large, raised plantation houses. Both vernacular and architect-designed houses followed a common form. Creole houses were expanded within the framework established in the 1720s. While previously most of the rural plantation houses had been constructed low to the ground, from this point on the raised plantation house became the standard for the colony. The Creole house evolved into an elevated country villa, surrounded by raised galleries which overlooked the fields, the river, the surrounding gardens and orchards as well as a veritable village of outbuildings (a cuisine, magasins, pigeonniers, garçonniers, manager's and workers' houses and slave quarters).
The first or living floor of the planter's house was raised on a brick rez-de-chaussée, eight to ten feet tall. Broad galleries, which extended out from all sides from the foundation walls, were supported by a peristyle of brick columns of simplified Tuscan design. The roof of the upper gallery was supported by a row of light, wooden colonnettes chamfered or turned in naval style. In the center of the house was a large salon, often elaborately decorated. The chimney breast was paneled and painted in the best French fashion of the day; the walls were painted or papered with wall-paper imported from France. A formal bedroom was located at either end of the salon with small cabinet rooms behind these. If a dining room was present on the first floor it was located behind the salon. Each room had doors which opened onto the gallery. The ground floor was reserved for storage rooms, slave quarters and, occasionally, offices or a dining room. The roof was hipped and double-pitched. Service buildings and slave quarters were often gable-roofed.
The period beginning about 1765 and ending with the Louisiana Purchase (1803) was a time of increasing prosperity; new events and new technology brought swift changes in the economy and perspective of Louisiana's citizens. In 1776, the American Revolution brought a period of social and political unrest to the region. Galvez, the new Spanish governor, adopted an anti-British and pro-American policy. A remarkably able military leader, he united the Creoles, the Acadians, the Germans, the slaves and his Spanish troops, to form a formidable army. He attacked the British in Baton Rouge, Mobile and Pensacola, and drove them from the area of West Florida, helping to secure the independence of the United States.
What Eli Whitney's cotton gin did for cotton production in the South in 1793, Etienne de Bore's method of crystallizing sugar did for the plantation economy of Louisiana only two years later. Suddenly, huge profits could be made from the production of sugar. Although it was the French Creoles who originally perfected the process, it was eventually the Anglo-Americans who most profited from it. On hearing the stories of enormous profits to be reaped in Louisiana, American settlers began drifting overland into Louisiana and floating down the Mississippi on flatboats. They emigrated from nearly every state. Soon, hundreds of sugar mills lined the banks of the Mississippi. Cajun and German farms were bought up by wealthy planters from the east, forcing them to move further back into the swamps and the prairies, where they reconstructed one or two-room gabled-roof folk cottages in the Acadian style and maintained a subsistence economy supplemented by hunting and trapping.
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