Woodlawn Plantation, near Napoleonville, Louisiana, built 1840, photographed 1938. Historic American Buildings Survey, Library of Congress.
I’ve been thinking about a couple of things during the past day or so: George Washington Cable’s story ‘Jean-ah Poquelin’ (1875), the fourth tale in his ‘Old Creole Days’ collection, and the now vanished plantation house known as Woodlawn, which once stood a few miles south of Napoleonville in Assumption Parish, Louisiana. Somehow the two have become fused in my mind, although Cable’s story is set in about 1805 in an overgrown plantation house outside New Orleans, and Woodlawn was not built until 1840 and in a much more rural location in the state. But both houses are mysterious, Poquelin’s because it revolves around a somewhat spectral secret not revealed until the end of the story, and Woodlawn because it was so unique architecturally for its time and place, and because its decline was…
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Nordic Mountain 