Shadows-on-the-Teche

The attic held 17,000 documents — letters, photographs, receipts — preserved through five generations. When William Weeks Hall donated the house to the National Trust for Historic Preservation in 1958, he handed over one of the best-documented plantations in America. The archive makes visible what most plantation records obscure: 1,112 enslaved people identified across the Weeks family plantations. A wall displays approximately 700 names. David Weeks built the house in 1834 on the banks of Bayou Teche. By the start of the Civil War, the plantation enslaved over 200 people. Hall, the last family owner, was a gay artist who kept the house open to visitors — Faulkner came, Disney came, Cecil B. DeMille came. The guest book reads like a mid-century cultural register, but the real archive is upstairs: the paper trail of who built the wealth that made hospitality possible. The current tour incorporates the lives named in those documents. Open daily. Admission charged. 317 E. Main Street, New Iberia.