Parlange Plantation: a family-held estate on False River

Parlange Plantation sits on False River in Pointe Coupee Parish, near New Roads. It is a National Historic Landmark, and it has an unusual record for an American farm: the same family has held it for about two centuries. The Library of Congress catalogs a photograph of it under the title “America’s oldest family plantation.”

How old the house is

The National Park Service nomination, dated 1975, says the house was built about 1750 by Vincent de Ternant, Marquis of Dansville-sur-Meuse, on a French land grant. It calls the house the finest and least altered large French colonial plantation house in the United States.

An architectural historian writing in SAH Archipedia is more careful. Family tradition holds that the house dates to about 1750, but the attic framing points to an early nineteenth-century date, with trim and moldings from about 1835. The heavy frame below suggests an older house may have been enlarged. The Park Service’s date, then, is best read as family tradition.

A farm business through several crops

De Ternant developed the land as an indigo plantation. He died in 1757, and his son Claude changed the crop to sugarcane and cotton. Claude’s widow Virginie married the French-born Colonel Charles Parlange, and the estate took his name. Their son Charles became a state senator, a U.S. district attorney, lieutenant governor, a federal judge and a justice of the Louisiana Supreme Court. After a stretch when the house was rented to tenants, his son Walter came back from New Orleans to farm it.

The estate once covered 10,000 acres. By the mid-1970s, the nomination says, 1,767 acres remained, stretching about three miles back from the lake. The family raised a Creole breed of cattle, sugarcane and cotton, and about ten tenant farmers worked the land under contract. Pointe Coupee Parish is still sugarcane country: the USDA’s 2022 Census of Agriculture put 58,173 acres of the parish in sugarcane.

Who did the work

The estate’s wealth came from enslaved labor. The nomination says slaves on the plantation made the brick for the raised basement, and that the cypress for the upper walls was hewn on the plantation. The SAH Archipedia entry says the family’s slaves made the building materials and built the house, and that the 1860 census recorded 129 slaves and 35 slave dwellings at Parlange. None of those dwellings survive.

What is open today

The parish tourism office lists Parlange as a private home at 8211 False River Drive. Published accounts say descendants of the original owners still farm about 1,500 acres of cattle and sugarcane there. Anyone planning a visit should contact the parish Office of Tourism first.