Palo Alto Plantation

Palo Alto House is a characteristic example of the type of large cottage or substantial but relatively small plantation residence prevalent throughout the lower south, particularly in Louisiana in the decade preceding the Civil War. It is among very few surviving examples that are represented in topographical views of rural buildings by a local artist of that period, Adrien Persac. The house has remained in continuous occupancy and in good repair, with few modifications.

No record of the builder or the exact date of construction has been found. A reasonable approximation, shortly before or after 1850, would be suggested by a combination of the building style, family and courthouse records, and the Persac painting, all slightly supported by a hint in the place name.

The property was acquired on March 13, 1852, by Pierre Oscar Ayraud and his wife, nee Rosalie Rodriguez, from the succession of Mathias Rodriguez, the latter's father. The official document does not describe the dwelling that is mentioned among improvements on the land. It might have been built by Mathias Rodreguez or it might have been built by Ayraud after acquiring the land. When the plantation was mortgaged by Ayraud on February 21, 1860, to Jacob Lemann, the dwelling house is specifically listed, and is later described with measurements, type roof, etc., and therefore identified.

The style of architectural detailing, especially as seen in the character of molding profiles, has a heavy, emphatic, and planar quality that developed following the refinement and delicacy in the scale of the early phase of Greek Revival in Louisiana in the 1830s. Although the heavy character definitely suggests the 1840s, the elaborations of interior plasterwork seem to anticipate the Victorianism of later phases of the Greek Revival in the 1850s. The absence of coal grates, cast iron, and rococo revival detail points to a time anterior to their popularity in the late 1850s. Also, there is no Italianate detail that sometimes accompanied the very late Greek Revival places in Louisiana.

Adrien Persac (1823-1873), a native of France, active (circa 1850-1873) as an architect, engineer, cartographer, lithographer, and artist, is remembered best for his engraved chart of all properties along the Mississippi River from Natchez to New Orleans, dated 1858, as well as for his fifteen or twenty surviving paintings of antebellum sites.

The scale figures in his typical gouache painting of Palo Alto, which are cut-out engravings pasted on according to his custom, are costumed in the style that was fashionable in Paris about 1855. This detail helps to confirm the tentative dating based on architectural style. The painting is presently in a Palo Alto house, inherited by the present owner via his mother, a granddaughter of Pierre Oscar Ayraud. Only in one other known instance, "Shadows-on-the-Teche" - a National Trust property, is a Persac original located inside the corresponding house.

An odd circumstance of the place name may be worthy of mention as possibly bearing out the presumed dating. The Spanish language is in conspicuous contrast to the Indian, French, or very English titles of Louisiana rural names such as the "Oaks", "Elms", "Magnolias", or the "Belles", this or that. This Spanish name could have been influenced by the battle in the Mexican War, on May 8, 1846, where militia from Louisiana and Texas was led by General Zachary Taylor. Only two other Spanish plantation names, other than family names, are noted in Louisiana, Buena Vista and Contreras. All three names figure in the series of Carl Nebel's color lithographs of Mexican War Battles, issued in Paris in 1851.

Palo Alto and the adjacent plantation St. Emma, were the site of a Civil War episode, part of a series of engagements in which 465 Union men were lost. St. Emma was a property of Charles Koch, Sidney A. Marchand in his "Story of Ascension Parish" quotes from a report of Col. J. M. Millan, dated September 25, 1862, in which the Colonel describes a series of skirmishes in the Donaldsonville-Bayou La fourche vicinity, and mentions the billeting of men at sugar warehouses of "Aro and Cox". (Misspelling of Ayraud and Koch).
Palo Alto plantation has varied in size from about 440 to 3300 acres and is now administered corporately exclusive of the main residence and grounds. It is associated with agricultural developments in the State, in that it was one of about ten properties in single ownership (see map) cultivating and processing sugar--one of the two or three largest such combinations in the period between the Civil War and World War I.

Because Palo Alto is one of the finest examples of the classical cottage with holdovers from the French Colonial period, because it is one of the few remaining houses documented in a Persac painting, and because of the plantation's role in the sugar industry, it has significance for the state of Louisiana as a whole.