Lakeport Plantation

On Friday of this week, I took a half-day off, and we drove down to Lake Village, Arkansas, to look into something we'd seen advertised for some months now--Lakeport Plantation. The Lakeport Plantation is the only remaining plantation home along the Mississippi River still standing in Arkansas. Arkansas never developed the widespread plantation culture, as was seen across much of the South, but there were a number of such places (at least until the Civil War). This particular plantation got its start in 1831 when the Johnson family moved from Kentucky to start a new life on the Arkansas frontier. The Lakeport Plantation home was built around 1859 by Lycurgus Johnson, son of the original settler. By the time of the Civil War, Lycurgus (I have no idea how to properly pronounce this name) owned over 4,400 acres of land and 150+ slaves. The picture below shows the Lakeport Plantation home as you drive through the cotton fields--this land has been in continuous cotton production ever since the plantation started.

The Lakeport Plantation home survived the Civil War unscathed, and the Johnson family continued to farm this location into the late 1920s, when it was sold to the Epstein family (these are the only two families to own the property until 2001, when the Epstein family deeded the house to Arkansas State University). Even though it was not particularly well-kept over the last decades, it was in remarkably good shape, given the age of the house.

We were given a tour by a local volunteer, and older woman who made sure to tell us that the Johnson family, when they owned these slaves, took "good care" of them, so that most stayed with the family after emancipation. This is a line we've heard mentioned several times before while living in the South, by older white residents still feeling lingering pains of the region's slave-holding past (history is very important to southerners). I'm sure the Johnson family was not as bad as most, but when one is the property of another, how can one look fondly upon the experience? Anyhow, I digress... The neatest thing to me about this home were the architectural accents that were found throughout it. It was built in the Greek Revival theme, with a number of interesting features. First, here are some of the original herringbone pattern hand-made bricks that lined the walkways around the home:

(you can't walk on this stretch of path anymore) and here is one of the fabulous original 11 foot tall wooden doors:

These doors opened into a spacious two-story home with very high (14 foot) ceilings. The first floor was fully finished (not surprising, given this is where the entertaining of guests would have been done), with ornate hand-made features like this ceiling medallion from which a chandelier would have hung.

Also prominently featured were the fire places in every room. Most had their mantles hand painted to emulate stone that would have been very expensive to have shipped here during this period:

There also was an elaborate water retention system built into this home. Even with the 50+ inches of rain we average every year around here, we will very often have extended dry periods that would have made getting good drinking water hard. So, two large cisterns were built, holding a combined total of 25,000 gallons of water. Here is the view of the larger of the two:

I'll say more about the water system later. The gentleman standing next to this cistern was an unofficial tour guide--he had grown up in the area, and worked on the farm as a boy in the 1970s, when the plantation home was still occupied and used to pay farm workers. He was visiting the site with his wife, and he was as helpful as the official guide. The large iron stove shown below was in a separate wing of the house, where the food was cooked in a kitchen:

It was then brought to a prep room located just off of the dining room for any final presentation before it was served in the formal dining room by slaves or servants. This system was commonly used in these plantation homes to help keep the cooking from heating up the house. Because there was no air conditioning for most of the existence of this house, a lot of things were done to keep things cool. In addition to separating away the kitchen, cooling was achieved by letting air freely flow through the home via large windows that could open like doors. Drafty homes helped keep them cooler in the summer, but also were a problem in the winter. Every decent-sized room in this home had its own fireplace to ward off the chill during the cooler parts of the year--the large number of fireplaces was also required because of how inefficient they were in heating a home, especially one of this size--most heat simply went up the chimney. It wouldn't have surprised me if many of these large homes consumed as much or even more firewood than we did up north... Back to the water system. The home had built-in gutters that collected the rain from the roof of the house and funneled it into downspouts along the side, which went into an underground piping system.

These pipes then carried the water to the cistern for storage. The house no longer uses these cisterns, and they have filled them with sand to keep them from collapsing or from kids falling into them, but it must have been a pretty efficient system for the time.

Visible on the horizon from this plantation home (and behind the modern farm equipment--the land surrounding this building is still used as a cotton farm) is the large new bridge they are building across the Mississippi River that takes highway 82 to Greenville, Mississippi and beyond:

This bridge, which many of you have already seen in one stage of construction or another, is expected to be completed in 2010, according to our tour guide. The old steel bridge that we currently use is very narrow, and is frequently struck by the heavy barge traffic that passes through the area. The road system is also being upgraded to handle more and larger traffic, as the approach to the bridge clearly shows:

The first part of this bridge to go up was the large in channel supports and the deck of the bridge--the part of construction taking the longest are the approaches to the bridge. These approaches (a series of bridges in themselves) must clear the tall levees built to protect the surrounding lands from flooding of the Mississippi and also carry traffic over a stretch of swampy hardwood forest that floods just about every year. I suspect their construction schedule may have been hampered by the high water on the Mississippi this year (the water was unusually high for this area this time of year).

We leave at the end of the week for our next trip up north, and look forward to seeing a lot of you then!