Shadows on the Teche: A Louisiana Plantation Reckoning with its Antebellum Legacy
As a child growing up in South Louisiana, plantation home tours comprised family outings and school field trips. The tours were romanticized narratives of the Antebellum South, with visions of beautiful southern belles in hoop-skirted dresses sipping mint juleps among the moss-draped oaks. This storybook narrative of Louisiana’s tumultuous agricultural past was the myth that sold admission tickets to tour opulent halls, luxurious furnishings, and the objects of wealthy planters in the 1800s.
Today, a reckoning with Louisiana’s slavery legacy is taking place as plantations reframe and retell their histories. Shadows on the Teche leads a growing movement across the Antebellum South to reconcile the whitewashing of history. The National Trust for Historic Preservation initiated the new narrative and helped fund the exhibit A Picture, Unbroken, which is on view across the street at the visitor’s center.
Historical Background
Shadows on the Teche was built in 1834 by David and Mary Weeks, who moved from England to establish the sugar plantation. The plantation home in New Iberia stands on the banks of Bayou Teche as a landmark of contradictions, chronicling a time in Louisiana’s history when agricultural prosperity was fueled by enslaved labor. Its graceful façade, framed by oak trees, conveys the glamorous curb appeal befitting wealthy planters in the 1800s Louisiana South…