Magnolia Plantation Research Paper

In the mid-1979s, Jean Baptiste LeComte II received land grants from the Spanish and French. Buildings started to be built in the 1800s. However it wasn’t until 1830 Magnolia Plantation saw its first residents. Jean’s son, Ambroise, and his wife, Julia Buard, turned the property into a cotton plantation. Using slave labor, they converted 2,000 acres wooded area into huge cotton fields. Their profits allowed them to expand to three plantations, using Magnolia Plantation as their home base. Most of Magnolia’s structures, which include a blacksmith shop, a plantation store, a former slave hospital, eight brick cabins and a gin barn are dated between 1835 to 1850. The slave hospital housed the owners after the main house was burned by Union soldiers during the Civil War in 1897. The house that stands today is a recreation of the original house.

Magnolia remained a prominent cotton-producing plantation for over a century. It was considered exceptional because of the farming technology, such as the cotton picking tractors and cotton gins and an 11 by 30-foot wooden screw cotton press. Ambroise and Julia’s daughter Ursula and her husband Matthew took over the plantation in 1852.

However, treatment of the slaves was not always good. The basement, which was used for curing meat, was also used to punish slaves. They were killed and cured.No one knows if they were ever served to their fellow slaves. Leg stocks still stand on the property as a reminder of the humiliations, starvations and public punishments. Escaped slaves were hunted down. The eight brick cabins were a rare stonework slave village. Two slave families lived in each building, sometimes up to 10 people in each unit. During the Civil War, the slave quarters were used to house Confederate prisoners, up to twenty-five in each. Some soldiers died from