The construction of Destrehan Plantation started in 1787 after Robert Antoine Robin DeLogny contracted Charles Paquet, a master craftsman and Free Man of Color (FMC) to build a home. The home, completed in 1790, was to be a raised French Colonial style home, 60 ft x 35 ft with a balustrade that circled around the home, and have a double pitched roof that was to cover the entire home. Records show that though DeLogny paid Paquet by giving him one personal slave of his own, rice, a cow and her calf, and 100 piastes (French word for the U.S. dollar.) The home would be associated with the surname Destrehan Robin’s daughter and her husband Jean Noel D’estrehan purchased the home after the passing of her father two years after the completion of its construction. Before the passing of D’estrehan, two wings were added to each side of the home. Later reconstruction done by their daughter fashioned the home into a Greek Revival style. A massive producer of sugar cane, the Creole D’estrehan family owned nearly sixty enslaved people at the time of purchase as well as year after the Louisiana Purchase. In 1811, Destrehan Plantation served as one of the three tribunal locations to try enslaved persons who were accused of taking part in the 1811 German Coast Uprising started by Charles Deslonde of the Andry Plantation. The verdict at this respective tribunal concluded with eighteen enslaved persons being executed. Decades later, there were over 200 enslaved persons owned at the property in 1850; the home was later used as the Freedmen’s Bureau Headquarters for two years while over 200 enslaved persons were seized by the Union Army at the turn of the Civil War. The home would remain in the Destrehan family for 123 years, ending in 1868.
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