West Baton Rouge Museum

The west bank has its own reckoning to make. Port Allen's parish museum holds one of the more complete accounts of Louisiana sugar plantation culture — the crop that made fortunes before the Civil War and came apart during it. An 1850 Creole cottage stands on the grounds. A former slave cabin stands beside it. The two structures sit in deliberate proximity, the architecture of inequality preserved in the same yard. West Baton Rouge Parish was formed in 1807. Sugar flourished in the southern part of Louisiana before the war. Then the Union took control of the Mississippi River. The crop couldn't reach market. Horses and mules were seized. Crops stayed unharvested in the fields. The parish's conveyance records show plantation properties sold at sheriff's sale to satisfy debts in the years immediately after the Civil War ended. What survived those sales is collected here: the story of the west bank, sugar and slavery and Creole settlers and the river that made and unmade them all. Open Tuesday through Saturday. Free or low admission.