The Whitney Plantation Historic District is a museum devoted to slavery in the Southern United States. The district, including the main house and outbuildings, is preserved near Wallace, in St. John the Baptist Parish, Louisiana, on the River Road along the Mississippi River. The plantation was started in 1752 by German immigrants Ambroise Haydel and his wife, and their descendants owned it until 1867. The museum, comprising main portions of the 2,000-acre plantation property, opened its doors to the public for the first time in December 2014. It was founded by John Cummings, a trial attorney from New Orleans who has spent more than $8 million of his own fortune on this long-term project, and worked on it for nearly 15 years. The director of research is Dr. Ibrahima Seck, a Senegalese scholar who has done much work on the history of slavery. The grounds contain imaginative exhibits and original art commissioned by Cummings, such as life-size sculptures of children. The sculptures are representative of people born into slavery before the Civil War, many of whom were interviewed as adults for the Federal Writers Project during the Great Depression. These oral histories of hundreds of the last survivors of slavery were collected and published by the federal government, to preserve their stories. The transcripts and some audio recordings are held by the Library of Congress. The French Creole raised-style main house, built in 1803, is the most important architectural example in the state. In addition, the plantation has numerous extant outbuildings or "dependencies": a pigeonnier, a plantation store, the only surviving French Creole barn in Louisiana, and slave quarters. The complex includes three archaeological sites which have had varying degrees of exploration. The 1884 Mialaret House, and its associated buildings and property, were added to the complex by later purchase. They help to reflect the long working history of the plantation. Some of the extensive land is still planted in sugarcane. The historic district was listed on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places in 1992. Whitney Plantation is also one of 26 sites featured on the Louisiana African American Heritage Trail.
Representation in other media
Scenes from the 2012 Quentin Tarantino film Django Unchained were filmed on and around the plantation.
The Atlantic magazine made a short documentary video about the museum, "Why America Needs a Slavery Museum".
