Apocryphal grandeur: Belle Grove Plantation in Iberville Parish, Louisiana
Date
2002
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
In the fall of 1952, residents of Iberville Parish, Louisiana, gathered at the banks of the Mississippi to witness the burning of the mansion house at Belle Grove Plantation. It was what all agreed was an awe-inspiring spectacle. In less than one hour, Belle Grove House reached its final and bitter end, consumed by fire. Some 100 years earlier, another generation of Iberville Parish residents also gathered to witness an equally awe-inspiring spectacle: the construction o f the largest house built in the American South prior to the Civil War. ☐ Belle Grove House dwarfed both its neighbors and its immediate surroundings. With its irregular massing and Italianate design Belle Grove House brought to the Lower Mississippi a style of architecture popular in urban New Orleans. ☐ To date, Belle Grove's massive size has overshadowed writing on the subject of the plantation and mansion house. At the same time, its tragic demise has been fodder for a romanticization on a scale unprecedented in American architecture. This study will treat Belle Grove House not as a romantic cultural icon, but as the product of the ambitions of an architect and owner. Belle Grove House will be considered within the greater context of the Lower Mississippi sugar country and within the plantation system that surrounded and supported it. At the same time, the use of space and the physical arrangement of both Belle Grove Plantation and Belle Grove House will be studied to gain a more objective understanding o f life on the grandest of all Lower Mississippi sugar plantations. ☐ Unfortunately, both Belle Grove Plantation and Belle Grove House no longer exist. As a result this effort will use as evidence photographs o f Belle Grove, family records, remaining artifacts from the house, and U.S. census and Iberville Parish records. Records o f neighboring plantations will help understand how Belle Grove functioned as a working and occasionally viable sugar plantation. Finally, Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) records will play a role in understanding the unusual and eccentric design and construction of the house, and how the house shaped life at Belle Grove.