Butler Greenwood Plantation

A Quaker physician from Pennsylvania established what became Butler Greenwood when the territory was still British. Dr. Samuel Flower died in 1813, the year after Louisiana became a state, leaving his house bordering Bayou Sara to his daughter Harriett, then twenty years old and married to Judge George Mathews. Her husband became chief justice of the Louisiana Supreme Court. His father, General George Mathews, survived multiple stabbings during the Revolutionary War to serve as a US Congressman, military general, and two-term Governor of Georgia. Harriett and Judge George Mathews used the forced labor of enslaved people to grow indigo, cotton, sugarcane, and corn, shipping from their dock on Bayou Sara. By the 1850s they ranked among the top-producing 9% of sugar planters in the state. In 1860, the household included Harriett, her son Charles Lewis Mathews — both listing their occupation as planter — his wife Penelope Stewart, their children, an Austrian music teacher, and an Irish gardener, with 96 enslaved people living in 18 dwellings. That year the 1,400 acres produced 130 bales of cotton, 2,000 bushels of corn, 175 hogsheads of sugar, and more than 10,000 gallons of molasses. After the Civil War the labor force had fallen to 27 freedmen working for monthly wages. The raised cottage-style house holds oil portraits, Brussels carpet, gilded pier mirrors, Mallard poster beds, a French Pleyel grand piano, and a Victorian formal parlor — twelve matching pieces still in their original upholstery. The original detached brick kitchen dates from the 1790s, the garden gazebo from the 1850s. Now home to author Anne Butler and her daughter Chase Poindexter — the seventh and eighth generation of the family — Butler Greenwood has been in continuous operation since the 1790s. Anne Butler has written 25 books about Louisiana plantation life, making it one of the most documented working plantations in the state. Book an overnight in one of the bed and breakfast cottages. You can sleep in the place you've been reading about.