Nottoway Plantation Site

John Hampden Randolph built Nottoway in 1859—a Greek Revival and Italianate mansion of 53,000 square feet and 64 rooms on 31 acres near White Castle. It was the second largest antebellum plantation house ever constructed in the Southern United States, sitting just behind neighboring Belle Grove Plantation in Iberville Parish. On May 15, 2025, it burned. Firefighters from 10 departments fought the blaze for 18 hours. The mansion is gone. The other structures on the property survived—several dependencies and historic buildings remain intact despite the loss of the main house. Whether it will be rebuilt remains unresolved. The fire made Nottoway a Rorschach test: people grappled publicly with what it means when plantation history goes up in smoke, and what it means if someone rebuilds it. The site is not currently open to visitors. Nottoway sits along the Great River Road, the collection of state and local roads that follows the Mississippi from Lake Itasca, Minnesota, to Venice, Louisiana—a route that took 30 years of planning before it was built in 1938, now designated as both a National Scenic Byway and an All-American Road. The mansion was part of that corridor's story. Now it's a site with dependencies still standing and a question mark where the house was.