Page 28 - THE BOOK MCLHHC

MAISON CHENAL & LACOUR HOUSE PROPERTIES & COLLECTION A Louisiana French Creole Tout Ensemble
THE ORIGINS OF CREOLE ARCHITECTURE
BY JAY D. EDWARDS REPRINTED FROM WINTERTHUR PORTFOLIO, VOL 29 #2-3
NORTH AMERICAN ADAPTATIONS
Three levels of influence of Antillian Creole architecture can be identified in the domestic architecture of North America. The first two fall within the definition of Creole-type houses. In the first, the diffusion of Caribbean forms is represented by North American houses modeled directly on Caribbean Creole examples, either Spanish, French or English. The second level includes local modifications of Creole models or combinations of previously distinct creole traditions. Both resulted in reformulated Creole houses and may be referred to as “nativized Creole architecture.” In the last level, individual creole architectural features were added to previously established North American continental forms. These are referred to as “creolized vernacular types.”
Many of the early symmetrical tripartite plan houses of Louisiana and the Gulf Coast represent more or less direct copies of models form Hispanola. Houses of this type had been constructed on the continent as early as the 1720’s, but the largest number were built after 1795 when a new method for crystallizing sugar was invented. This permitted the first large- scale production of sugar just at the time when Louisiana was to experience its greatest influx of Caribbean immigrants (1791-1808). They were fleeing revolutionary Saint Domingue and anti- Napoleonic Spanish western Cuba. Many had been successful sugar planters in Saint Domingue, and they constructed raised plantation houses in the Creole style along Louisiana’s rivers and bayous as late as the 1830’s.
Galleries were used on French colonial houses and fortifications form the very earliest days of Gulf Coast Settlement. Fort Lewis in Old Mobile had a barracks with a “gallery from one end to
the other on the side of the river” before 1704. This may be the earliest documented building with a full-length front gallery in North America, but may builders subsequently adopted this amenity in the second and third decades of the century. The De la Pointe/Krebbs house and the numerous single-story galleried houses in 1712 by a M. Le Maire in Mobile and Dauphine Island resemble the smaller early eighteenth-century colonial houses of French Hispanola. “All the houses are frame and one story high; there is only one house which has two stories. The dwellings are comfortable enough. The walls are made of mud and whitewashed outside and inside. The lime is made of oysters and other shells. Some of these houses have a solid brick foundation; all are two or three feet above the ground to protect the timber work from dampness; most have a gallery all around, and those with haven’t are covered from top to bottom with lattices.”
A number of nativized Louisiana Creole houses constructed in the colonial and post- colonial periods did not conform precisely to prototypical Caribbean lines. In the second level of Caribbean influence, Spanish Creole floor plan geometry was sometimes adapted to the previously established geometric values of the coastal communities, revealing the intensity of local vested interests. One popular Louisiana plan had three rooms-a large central salle with bedrooms of different widths on either side, the larger bedroom heated by a fireplace. Similar to the house plants of Saint Domingue, the smaller bedroom was often partitioned transversely to create children’s bedrooms, unheated except in the largest houses. Magnolia Mound Plantation house, built in 1791 in Baton Rouge, was constructed in this fashion.
The Spanish commandant’s house in Baton
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