Chene Vert in East Baton Rouge Parish, Louisiana - Creole plantation house

Magazine Antiques, March, 1997 by H. Parrott Bacot

A felicitous addition to the historic structures in East Baton Rouge Parish in Louisiana is Chene Vert, a plantation house originally situated some eighty miles west in Saint Landry Parish, where it had been the center of a sugar and cotton plantation. When it was discovered by Dr. and Mrs. F. Wayne Stromeyer in 1983 it was in a state of considerable deterioration. Collectors of early Louisiana material culture, the Stromeyers had the house moved with great difficulty across the Atchafalaya swamp and the Mississippi River to its present, extraordinarily beautiful site.

The rolling property is most appropriate for a house bearing the French name for live oak since the site is populated with live oaks as well as pecans and other native trees. Moreover, its original plantation had been called Live Oak since the middle of the nineteenth century and so the Stromeyers wanted to continue the use of the name. However, with many properties in neighboring parishes bearing the same appellation, they elected to use the French translation.

As a bonus, situated on the new site is a cottage built about 1835 [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATES II, XV OMITTED]. The small one-and-one-half-story building, made of bousillage (a mixture of mud, moss and deer hair on laths) construction, has four rooms on the main floor and a sizable bedroom upstairs. The Stromeyers have restored it as a guesthouse, providing a sympathetic setting for some of their outstanding collection of Acadian furniture, much of it painted, and Acadian cotton textiles.

Chene Vert has the floor of a typical two-story Creole plantation house of the 1770s to the 1830s. The ground floor has brick walls, while the second floor is of frame construction with brick infill between posts - a construction technique known in French as briquette entre poteaux. The ground floor has a large central room, which was and is used for dining. It is flanked by what were originally two bedrooms, each with a good-sized cabinet behind it, abutting the rear loggia. The same plan is repeated on the second floor, with the large central room being the salon. Unlike most houses of this design, what should have been an open loggia across the back of this floor was originally closed in and used as an office (and now serves as a study).(1) About the middle of the nineteenth century, on its original site, the groundfloor loggia was also enclosed, and a crude staircase was built from it to the room above, providing interior access to the second floor, which could otherwise be reached only by a pair of exterior staircases at the ends of the front galerie, typical of Creole design.

In restoring the house and adapting it for contemporary living, the Stromeyers elected to have the loggia on the ground floor open as it had been originally, but since they also wished to maintain an interior staircase, they replaced the mid-nineteenth-century one with a stairway from the east cabinet on the ground floor to the study on the second floor. They also made the remaining cabinets into bathrooms and converted the southeastern ground-floor bedroom into a kitchen.

Architecturally, the house largely looks backward with its Creole floor plan, Federal wraparound (or boxed) mantels, casement windows, and glazed French doors and batten doors, both with strike latches. However, the curious stepped-base brick piers to the galeries are a foretaste of the Greek revival style. A comparison with Shadows-on-the-Teche, built not far away between 1831 and 1834 and now a property of the National Trust for Historic Preservation is instructive.(2) Its floor plan and room arrangement are nearly identical to Chene Vert's, but that is where the similarity ends. Shadows is all Nick with Tuscan columns trader an elegant frieze and a deep gable on each end of the house - all in the best Greek revival taste. It has six-over-six sash windows, six-panel interior doors, and unglazed paneled double doors giving onto the from galerie, all with up-to-date mortise locks. Granted, Chene Vert was in a more inaccessible part of Louisiana, but the dichotomy in the choice of its finishing details is not a result of its remote location but rather a characteristic of Creole architecture. The Federal facades of the mantels in the principal rooms are stylish enough for Shadows, even though they wrap around the sides in the traditional French manner. The simple batten interior doors and strike latches are surprising for a house of its quality, and the entire ground floor has exposed ceiling beams, which is quite retardataire. On the second floor, however, the ceilings are plastered, as are all the ceilings at Shadows.

Years of research have failed to unearth a building connect or other document that would reveal the construction date of Chene Vert. The unimproved property on which the house was built was sold at auction on March 18, 1821, by the widow of Barthelemy Dejean(3) to Benoit Vanhille (d. 1840), a native of Dunkerque, France,(4) who had married. Caroline Fentenot (1800 - 1841) in Saint Landry Church on November 7, 1815.(5) A reasonable starting date for the building of the house, therefore, would be somewhere between 1824 and 1834, the earlier date allowing for seasoning the lumber, making the bricks, and acquiring any imported millwork and hardware.