Oak Alley Plantation

Best known for its cathedral-like canopy of 300-year-old oaks, Oak Alley has become a model for how a plantation museum can confront, rather than romanticize, the forced labor that built its wealth.

The 28 live oaks that give Oak Alley its name were planted in the early 1700s, roughly a century before any house stood at the end of their mile-long allee, likely by an earlier French colonial settler whose identity has been lost to history. When wealthy sugar planter Jacques Telesphore Roman built his Greek Revival mansion between 1837 and 1839, he sited it to align perfectly with the existing oak canopy, turning a century-old landscape feature into the plantation's defining image.

Roman originally named his estate 'Bon Sejour,' but the property became universally known as Oak Alley for its avenue of trees. The mansion's grandeur was built entirely on the forced labor of more than 100 enslaved people, who cleared land, built the house, and worked the plantation's sugar cane fields, widely considered among the most brutal and dangerous forms of agricultural labor practiced under American slavery.

The Roman family lost the plantation to financial collapse in the years following the Civil War, and the property changed hands and fell into disrepair before restoration began in 1925. Long marketed primarily around its architecture and oaks, Oak Alley added a researched exhibit in 2013, 'Slavery at Oak Alley,' that reconstructs slave quarters on their original foundations and documents the identities and lives of many of the enslaved people who lived and worked there, reframing the site's history around the people whose labor built it.