Whitney Plantation is an educational center that discusses plantation life from a slave’s point of view.
The Whitney Plantation—originally the Heidel Plantation, named for the original owners—was active from 1752 to 1975, in other words, both before the Civil War and then after the war, with sharecroppers working the land. At its height, 100 slaves lived on the Whitney Plantation and produced sugar cane for the Heidel family.
Here is the plantation house. It is not a grand plantation house; it is only one room deep (with a rear balcony). Note the painted decoration, including the painted marble effects.
And compare that to the slave quarters.
Sugarcane production was brutal. “Slaves in the Louisiana sugar cane world lived what the former slave and civil rights activist Frederick Douglass termed a ‘life of living death.’ The average life span of a mill hand was said to be only seven years — a message that circulated widely among enslaved people who feared being sold into bondage in sugar fields.”1 The leaves of the sugarcane stalk have sharp edges; slaves harvesting sugarcane plantations often suffered deep cuts as they worked the fields. Meanwhile, the slaves who pressed the cane into juice could lose limbs if they got themselves caught in the mechanical rollers; and the slaves who boiled the juice to crystalize it into sugar risked being scalded. It’s all awful.