Album: St. Joseph Plantation: Cabin 4

National Center for Preservation Technology and Training

St. Joseph Plantation, the sister plantation to Felicity Plantation, is presently an operating sugarcane plantation. The construction dates of the main house are believe to be between 1820s and the 1830s. The home was originally a raised Creole cottage due to its current ground floor not being enclosed but that of open space. Louis Scioneaux, son of Pierre Scioneaux, is believed to be one of the owners that started the initial construction. The home would change ownership twice post-Scioneaux; first to Englishman and Protestant, William Priestly, then to Alexis Ferry and his wife Josephine Aime, daughter of Valcour Aime of St. Jacques (James) Parish, Louisiana. Upon death of Priestly’s wife, the plantation was sold along with thirty-seven enslaved persons who were attached to the property per legal records. The plantation’s staple crop was that of sugarcane and the Mississippi River that lay in front provided a tremendous advantage of importation of goods and exportation of hogsheads filled with sugar and molasses. Ferry is shown as owning sixty-nine enslaved persons in 1850 with the number decreasing in 1860 to forty-five. It should be noted that he also owned Bourbon Plantation on the opposite side of the Mississippi River and the decrease may have been attributed to a sale or persons working on other properties. Unlike the neighboring Oak Alley Plantation who has a photograph of the parallel-rowed slave cabins or tenant farmer houses and the faint image of the sugar mill in the far background, there is no photographic evidence to show exactly where the 26 cabins documented on the 1860 census were located in proximity to the sugar mill or the house. Today, there are six cabins that still stand; a few of which have been relocated from its sister plantation. Sharecropping families resided in the cabins beyond the 1960s. Related video content (Lebora Melancon: Memories Within Her Cabin and Her Food with Robin Ann Bazile Garnett): https://youtu.be/y52q2hQpDis