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

Magazine Antiques, March, 1997 by H. Parrott Bacot

In restoring the house the Stromeyers had the exterior colors analyzed by the restoration architect Matthew Mosca of Baltimore. The white siding. Paris green batten shutters, and deep reds and yellow ocher of the dado on the upper front galerie reproduce the original colors. They have taken a somewhat freer hand with the interior colors, although those too were known in early nineteenth-century Louisiana.

Equal care was taken planning the formal, fenced parterre in front of the house [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE I OMITTED]. The design was copied from a garden plan for a Creole cottage in New Orleans, the only city in America where for a good part of the nineteenth century watercolor renderings and plot plans drawn by an architect or an artist were customarily filed in the Notorial Archives with an act of sale. The chosen rendering, dated May 8, 1847, was done by the French-born architect Jacques Nicholas Bussiere dePouilly (1804-1875),(6) and depicts a low, geometric parterre that recalls seventeenth-century French designs, for in garden design as well as architecture, Louisiana Creoles held to old forms and ideas longer than the Anglo-Americans who settled the eastern states.

The Stromeyers brought many old plants from the original site to the newly created garden, including flowering bulbs such as parrot gladioli, yellow narcissi, orange day-lilies, red amaryllis, and crinum lilies, along with such seed plants as yellow and pink four-o'clocks. Cedar trees were planted at the terminal points of the garden in the French fashion followed in Louisiana. Other plants known in early nineteenth-century Louisiana gardens, such as sweet olive bushes, sago palms, and a wide variety of antique roses, as well as flowering plants such as lantanas, have also been settling into this traditional garden.

The salon [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATES III-V OMITTED], on the second floor, is furnished in accordance with early nineteenth-century Louisiana inventories with objects considered appropriate to a family of the Vanhilles' status. They indicate a mixture of locally made objects, objects brought from the East Coast, and ceramics, glass, and some metalware from France and England. The view in Plate III includes ancestral portraits from Mrs. Stromeyer's family by Jacques Guillaume Lucien Amans (1801-1888), who worked in Louisiana from 1836 to about 1858.(7) On loan to the house from one of her kinsmen, they depict Francois Barthelemy LeBeau de la Barre (1806-1854) and Christine Sylvanie Fuselier, who was born in Saint Martinville, Louisiana, in 1810(8) and married LeBeau de la Barre on October 9, 1830. In front of the mahogany New York sofa of 1805-1820 is a delicate cherry table that descended in the Sprigg family of Evergreen plantation near Alexandria, in Rapides Parish, Louisiana, and may have been made there, 1800-1825. On it is a Vieux Paris coffee service, some pieces of which bear the mark used by the Nast factory (1780-1835) in the 1820s and 1830s. The leather-covered mahogany easy chair is one of several surviving examples made in New Orleans between 1825 and 1835. The square-backed mahogany armchair is French and may date from 1800-1830. To the left of the sofa and in the left background of the view in Plate III are a worktable and a card table, respectively, both of mahogany and both made in Philadelphia, 1805-1820. The Vieux Paris cachepot on the card table is decorated with a coastal landscape and is marked "C.Leclerc 1848" by a hitherto unknown decorator or factory. Barely visible at the right behind the sofa in the same view is a most uncommon upholstered mahogany side chair in the Louis XV style with cabriole front legs, although its neoclassical saber back legs date it to 1820-1835. The secondary woods - yellow poplar, white pine, and cherry - are consistent with those known to have been used in Louisiana in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Armoires and tables with cabriole legs were made in Louisiana from the eighteenth century until 1830.