Whitehall Plantation

François Pascalis de Labarre IV built Whitehall in 1857, the year New Orleans was shipping most of the nation's cotton to Western Europe from the largest port in the Southern United States. Four years later, Union troops occupied the house during the Civil War — New Orleans was the biggest city in the South and an early target for federal forces. After 1892, Whitehall became a gambling casino. Then a Jesuit retreat house. Then Saint Agnes Church. Since 1935 it has been Magnolia School. The house stands in the town of Jefferson, near River Road, one of the few surviving plantation houses in Jefferson Parish. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Generations of Jefferson Parish students have been educated in a building that once quartered occupying soldiers and once took bets. The layered uses tell a story about survival — what gets kept when everything around it changes. You can visit it as Magnolia School, still in operation, still standing on the same ground where cane once grew and troops once camped.