Inglewood Plantation Historic District

Six miles south of Alexandria, ninety-eight acres run along the east bank of Bayou Robert. The main house dates to 1836, built on a symmetrical Creole plan — three rooms wide, two deep, with a gallery wrapping the front and sides. In 1850 someone renovated and expanded it with hipped-roofed wings, making for a complex roof. By 1988, when the district joined the National Register of Historic Places, the property held two plantation houses and twenty-two support structures. All but one were built between 1836 and 1935. Cotton fields ran to the horizon in every direction. Among the outbuildings: a slave cabin and a smoke house, the infrastructure of forced labor that made the cotton economy possible. The place was also known historically as Hard Times Plantation. The name survives in the record without explanation. What remains is the built environment — galleries, wings, dependencies — and the open fact of what happened here.