ASHS 2015 Annual Conference

Oak Alley and Laura Plantation Tour

Price: $ 95 per person. Advance registration is required.  Price includes entrance fees to both Plantations. No meals included. 

Date: Monday, August 3 

Time: 12:30 P.M. – 6:30 P.M. 

Leaves hotel at: 12:30 P.M. Please arrive at the Canal Street Entrance 15 minutes prior to departure time.

Please note that in case of insufficient registered participants, the tour will be cancelled and you will be fully refunded. 

You will be picked up by an excellent driver-guide and begin your narrated scenic drive out of New Orleans. Driving along the shores of Lake Pontchartrain, you start your pilgrimage back in time to the Antebellum South. After a 90 minutes ride, you arrive to visit two Louisiana plantations on the West Bank of the Old Mississippi River Road. 

First is a guided tour of Oak Alley Plantation to admire this Louisiana jewel of Greek Revival architecture. Guides in period costumes will bring to life the stories of generations who lived on this land. They will share with you every detail of this mansion's history since 1830. Free time to walk around under a spectacular canopy of 28 giant live oaks around the mansion. From the River Road you will see and hear all about Whitney, St. Joseph and Evergreen Plantations. 

At Laura, the Creole Plantation, the guided tour transports you with dramatic detail into the charmed yet tragic lives of four generations of Creole owners and their slaves. After touring the Maison Principale, the visit moves onto the grounds, surrounded by sugarcane fields and 12 buildings on the National Register, winding into the plantation gardens: the formal Jardin Français, the kitchen garden and Laura's new BananaLand.  This part of the tour places visitors at the exact locations where stories recalling the sobering events of human slavery happened. The tour concludes inside one of the 1840s slave cabins where sugarcane workers lived until 1977 and where the ancient west-African folktales of Compère Lapin, better known as the legendary rascal Br'er Rabbit, were recorded.