Belle Alliance

Belle Alliance is locally significant in the area of architecture because it is a landmark within the architectural patrimony of Assumption Parish. It is also significant as a rare surviving example of the Greek Revival plantation houses that once dotted the parish's landscape.

Architectural Significance as a Parish Landmark

Assumption is one of Louisiana's older parishes, having been legally established in 1807. Its early population consisted of persons of French, Spanish, Acadian, and German descent. This mixture was expanded by the addition of Anglo-Americans after Louisiana became, first a territory (1803), and finally a state within the United States (1812).

Agriculture has always been the parish's economic mainstay, with sugar cane as the dominant crop. Perhaps because of its rural focus, Assumption has never developed large communities. The small town of Napoleonville is the only place of any size, and its population is only 802.

Despite its long history, Assumption Parish has few real architectural landmarks. The Division of Historic Preservation's Standing Structures Survey for the parish records approximately 2,000 buildings defined as historic (50 years old or more). According to survey records, the vast majority of Assumption's residences are small Creole cottages, shotguns, bungalows, and simple versions of Queen Anne Revival and Eastlake cottages. A handful of the latter display well-developed gallery decoration, and a few houses have projecting Queen Anne bays. Nevertheless, most of the parish's domestic architecture can only be described as undistinguished. The survey also shows that, for the most part, the region's commercial buildings also fall into the undistinguished category. Against this background, the parish's few landmark buildings assume added importance. These include one otherwise simple cottage whose major feature is a large octagonal turret reflecting the influence of the Queen Anne Revival style, a handful of architecturally important churches, two historic school buildings (one a restrained version of the Beaux Arts style, the other displaying a restrained Neo-Classical design), a small Neo-Classical style bank, two Romanesque commercial buildings, an Italian villa style parish courthouse with its accompanying Italianate jail, and two major antebellum Greek Revival plantation houses found along Bayou Lafourche. These dwellings are Madewood (National Register) and Belle Alliance.

Belle Alliance is also architecturally significant because the dining room in the 1889 addition is believed to be by far the finest late nineteenth-century interior in the parish. The only other possibility for an interior as impressive as the dining room would be the parish courthouse, but here the public spaces were never richly styled. Nothing can rival the dining room at Belle Alliance for its impressive scale, elaborate wainscoting, intricate Queen Anne Revival glazing, and, above all, its well-detailed and monumental Italianate mantel. This mantel/overmantel set has the presence and scale that one would expect to find in a grand hotel lobby of the period rather than in a rural plantation house.

Architectural Significance as a Rare Surviving Example of the Greek Revival Style

Like the economies of other Louisiana sugar parishes, that of Assumption Parish boomed in the thirty or so years prior to the Civil War. Sugar planters were among the wealthiest of the wealthy, building fine residences to reflect their standing. Almost all of the houses they built were in the wildly popular Greek Revival style. The number of major Greek Revival plantation houses produced during this architectural "flowering" will never be known exactly, although the census schedules for 1860 provide clues. On the eve of the Civil War, there were forty-five large slave holdings in Assumption Parish. Of this number, sixteen involved plantations with over one hundred slaves; the other twenty-nine had between fifty and one hundred slaves each. Only two of the forty-five holdings involved individuals who did not reside in the parish. Given the foregoing, it is clear that Bayou Lafourche, the parish's major waterway, was once lined with plantation houses, which for the most part would have been in the Greek Revival style. Today, however, only Belle Alliance and Madewood remain.

Historical Note

According to tradition, the plantation known as Belle Alliance came into existence when German immigrant Charles Kock combined three smaller Bayou Lafourche plantations into a seven-thousand-acre holding sometime before 1846. According to tradition, a fire destroyed the original house in that year; the candidate was erected on the location of the first house at that time. By 1860 the extremely prosperous Kock family owned 176 slaves. Although Kock died that year, his heirs managed to retain ownership of Belle Alliance until 1915. It was Kock's son James who expanded the home in 1889, hiring Paul Andry (presumably of what would become the New Orleans firm of Andry & Bendernagel) as his architect. By 1926 C. Stewart Churchill managed the property, of which he and partner Dubourg Thibaut became owners in 1944. Mr. and Mrs. Churchill lived in the home, gradually repairing and improving it over the next several years. After their deaths, family members continued in residence until 1985. The property eventually came under the ownership of the Evan Belle Corporation, which sold it to Mr. and Mrs. Philip Grieve in 1998. The Grieves are restoring the house as a tax act project.