The History of Oak Alley Plantation

The oaks came first

The feature everyone comes to see — the quarter-mile double row of 28 live oaks arching over the walk to the river — predates the house by roughly a century. The trees were planted in the early 1700s, most sources placing it between about 1725 and 1750, by an unknown French colonial settler who left no other mark on the record. They were already mature, cathedral-like oaks when the present estate was built, and it is from them that riverboat travellers took to calling the place "Oak Alley," long before that became its official name.

Jacques Roman and the Big House

In 1836 the land was acquired by Jacques Thélesphore Roman, a Creole sugar planter and the brother of Louisiana governor André Roman. Between 1837 and 1839 he raised the Greek Revival mansion he named Bon Séjour, its design usually attributed to the architect Joseph Pilié — the father of Roman's wife, Marie Thérèse Célina Pilié Roman. The house was built by enslaved workers, with the bricks made on site and the marble, glass and slate shipped in by steamboat. Its most quoted detail is deliberate symmetry: 28 colossal columns around the house, one for each of the 28 oaks leading up to it.

Sugar and slavery

Oak Alley was a working sugarcane plantation, and by the 1850s Louisiana was producing roughly a quarter of the world's cane sugar. That wealth was built entirely on forced labour. Records document around 110 to 120 enslaved people held at the estate at a given time under the Romans, and the plantation's own research has since named close to 200 individuals across its history — the people who cleared the land, tended and cut the cane, ran the sugar mill and served the household.

One of them changed American agriculture. In 1846–47 an enslaved gardener known as Antoine succeeded in grafting the first commercially viable paper-shell pecan — an innovation so significant that it is named in Oak Alley's National Historic Landmark citation alongside the architecture and the oaks. It is a reminder that the skill and knowledge on the plantation belonged to the enslaved as much as to the owners, a history the site now tells directly through its Slavery at Oak Alley exhibit and its online slave database.

Decline after the Civil War

Jacques Roman died of tuberculosis in 1848. His widow Célina managed the estate and nearly bankrupted it before their son Henri took over in 1859. Emancipation and the economic collapse that followed the Civil War made the plantation unviable, and in 1866 it was sold at auction for $32,800. A run of owners who could not afford its upkeep followed, and by the 1920s the mansion stood vacant and deteriorating.

The Stewarts and the rescue

In 1925 Andrew Stewart, a cotton broker, bought the property as a gift for his wife Josephine, who commissioned the architect Richard Koch to lead an extensive restoration — adding plumbing, electricity and other modern comforts while preserving the antebellum structure. The Stewarts ran the land as a cattle ranch and later reintroduced sugarcane, this time without enslaved labour, and were the last people to live in the Big House.

A landmark open to everyone

Josephine Stewart created a foundation in 1966 to preserve and share the estate, and on her death in 1972 the mansion and grounds passed to the Oak Alley Foundation, a non-profit that still runs the site today. Oak Alley was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1974 and opened to the public in 1976. The 63-acre site now interprets its whole story — the Big House, the reconstructed cabins and the Slavery at Oak Alley exhibit, the blacksmith shop, the Sugarcane Theater and the oak alley itself.