WEST-AFRICAN Captured for their agricultural and construction skills, their work created the Louisiana colony and influenced all segments of the newly-forming Creole culture, best seen today in language, cuisine, music, family-centered traditions, architecture and life-style. This sugarcane plantation started in 1805 with 7 enslaved people (six west-Africans and one Amerindian). As the plantation grew, so did the number of enslaved workers. Four original slave cabins built in the 1840s remain standing today on the plantation. By the onset of the Civil War, 186 workers were enslaved on this farm. Following the emancipation of slaves in Louisiana (1866), the great majority of these former slaves continued to live in the Laura Plantation quarters.
Descendants of these men & women were displaced in 1895 when cypress lumber companies had their own workers inhabit the Laura slave quarters. The cabins were lived in until 1977. Descendants of slaves live near the Laura Plantation to this day.
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