Page 29 - THE BOOK MCLHHC

MAISON CHENAL & LACOUR HOUSE PROPERTIES & COLLECTION A Louisiana French Creole Tout Ensemble
Rouge exhibits this geometry. The house was first occupied by Colonel Dixon under the English administration until 1779 when Baton Rouge was captured by the Spanish. Spanish governor Don Bernardo de Galvez then made it his personal residence, and it was under his command that the house was recorded for a royal survey in 1788. Zachary Taylor was first posted to Baton Rouge in 1809 and returned in 1845 to take up permanent residence in the commandant’s house where he lived until his presidential inauguration in 1849. His pencil sketch of the residence sent in a letter to historian Benson Lossing of New York on December 13, 1848, shows that the southernmost room of the house had been lengthened by a single bay, and the room arrangement had remained the same. Although asymmetrical three-room plans of houses such as these may be interpreted as a natural expansion of the Norman two-cell plan, their adoption and popularity were strongly influenced by local examples of the Spanish tripartite plan, which they closely resemble.
A more creative method of accommodating the Spanish tripartite plan to local preferences was to blend two plans together, producing something entirely new. An asymmetrical two- room Norman core was occasionally set entirely inside the elongated salle of a Spanish-plan house with a large salon. This resulted in a four- room module with an asymmetrical core but a symmetrical periphery. The legacy of such innovations can be seen in the house built circa 1765 for the commandant of the Cabannocey post. It was surveyed for the Spanish in 1791 and functioned as the informal seat of government for St. James Parish for many years. It was fully French Creole in form and framing technology and its geometry closely resembled a traditional expanded Norman plan except that it failed to conform to the principle of decrescendo. This seemingly subtle but important difference reveals that the building stood outside both the French and Spanish traditions.
Another historically significant Louisiana house illustrates something of the complexities of the plan development in the colonial buildings. In 1983 the Victorian exterior of the Nicholas LaCour plantation house in Pointe Coupee Parish was removed, and the house was transported eighty miles south to Jefferson Island, Iberia Parish. It had an asymmetrical plan with unusually large rooms. The high quality of carpentry of its timber frame speaks to a French colonial genesis prior to 1765. Roman numerals had been chiseled into the bottoms of each original post and brace. A reconstruction that included replacement of the missing numbered members revealed that the building had been substantially altered early in its history. Originally it was built as a larger Spanish tripartite plan structure too
large to have been a house; it was perhaps a government post or magazin (warehouse) for the Company of the Indies at either the Pointe Coupee or Natchez post in the 1720’s or early in the 1730’s. No documentation on the building has yet been recovered.
The original central salon was gigantic-38 by 24 feet-sufficiently long that it was later divided into two substantial rooms with a plank partition. One of the original 22-foot-long end rooms was removed, transforming the building into a standard Louisiana three-room Norman plan, probably at the time the house was first moved and renovated to be a residence. This may have happened in 1737 when indigo planter Nicholas LaCour recorded a substantial unspecified deft to the Company of the Indies. LaCour was ambitious, pugnacious, illiterate, and not of aristocratic background. He embraced Louisiana fold Creole values in converting his new plantation house into an asymmetrical structure and probably took considerable pride in the knowledge that its rooms were larger than most- perhaps all others-in the colony.
The third level of Caribbean Creole influence was played out on a broader stage. Patterns of expansion and elaboration were selectively adopted into previously established North American coastal vernacular traditions, first along the southern coasts and shortly thereafter northward along the eastern shores. Different patterns prevailed in different communities. Pensacola, Florida, was governed by the Spanish between 1698 and 1763 (with some incursions by the French). After the French and Indian War, it was ceded to the British but was reconquered and governed by the Spanish between 1791 and 1813. Late in this second Spanish period (probably 1808), a Senor Noriega took a survey of his rental properties in downtown Pensacola. All houses had front galleries and rear cabinet- loggia ranges; some were further expanded by the addition of a small bedroom on one side of the core, reflecting the weakly developing economy in the area. Another modification to the core included the insertion of an interior hallway. This demonstrates something of the processes of syncretism occurring along the Gulf Coast in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Similar process occurred in other Gulf Coast towns. Biloxi, Mississippi, was governed by the French from 1699 until the English were granted the area of West Florida in 1763. The Spanish in New Orleans under Don Bernardo de Galvez drove them out in 1781, helping the Americans to secure the South for the new republic. In 1803, when Louisiana was transferred to America, many Louisiana French Creoles who were dissatisfied with the idea of an American administration moved eat to the Gulf Coast to continue living
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