The Big House and Exhibits at Oak Alley Plantation

Hours, prices and access verified by the Oak Alley Plantation tours team — last checked August 26, 2026

One guided building, five self-guided exhibits and a quarter of a mile of trees. Set out in the order you meet them walking in from the car park, with the time the Foundation itself suggests for each.

The alley: 28 oaks, a quarter of a mile

The trees came first. Two rows of fourteen southern live oaks run from the River Road levee straight to the front steps, and they were already mature when the house was built — planted by someone whose name has not survived, roughly a century earlier. Passing steamboat crews called the place Oak Alley for them long before anyone changed the name on the deed from Bon Séjour.

Live oaks grow outward rather than upward, so the canopies meet overhead and the whole avenue reads as a tunnel. You walk it on the way in, and there is nothing to pay and nothing to book to stand in it.

The Big House and its 28 columns

Greek Revival, built 1837–39, and wrapped on all four sides by twenty-eight Doric columns — one for every tree in the alley. The colonnade is free-standing, which is what gives the upper gallery its depth and the rooms behind it their shade.

This is the only guided part of the visit. A guide in period dress takes you through the ground and upper floors, and the tour runs about thirty-five to forty minutes. Two things are worth knowing before you join it: photography is not permitted in the rooms, and the route is stairs. Anyone who cannot manage them is offered an iPad tour of the upper floor instead, and the ramped basement level stays open to everyone.

Slavery at Oak Alley

A self-guided exhibit housed in reconstructed quarters under the trees, covering the men, women and children enslaved on this plantation and what happened to them after emancipation. The Foundation asks visitors to allow at least an hour, and that is worth taking seriously. Apart from the house tour it is the longest single thing here. It is also the part most day trips leave people short of time for.

The Foundation also maintains a public database of the people it has been able to name from the plantation records. That work is the reason this exhibit reads as documentation rather than as gesture.

The Sugarcane Theatre

Built around a three-dimensional map of the Roman family holdings. It explains how cane was planted, cut, ground and boiled on this stretch of the river, and how it is farmed on the same land now. Short — fifteen to twenty minutes — and it is the exhibit that makes sense of the sugar kettles you will already have walked past on the lawn.

The People of Oak Alley, 1866–1924

The plantation after the Romans. The 1866 auction, the tenant and wage-labour decades, and the families who lived and worked here until 1925, when the last resident owners bought the place. It answers the question the house tour tends to leave open, which is what happened next.

The blacksmith shop, the kettles and the tombs

A working forge stands among the outbuildings. The grounds between it and the levee carry cast-iron sugar kettles, exhibit outbuildings, the Roman family tomb and the Stewart family graveyard. Both gate tickets include all of it, and all of it is self-guided. This is where a visit expands or contracts to fit the time you have.

How long each part takes

Times from the Foundation’s own guidance. The Big House figure is the guided tour only and does not include queueing for your slot.

Add those up and the honest total is closer to three hours than two. Most guided trips from New Orleans allow two, which covers the house, the alley and one exhibit comfortably. Two trips allow three. Book one of those if the exhibits are the reason you are going rather than a bonus. Both sit on Oak Alley and swamp tour, sorted by that column.