Laurel Valley Plantation

Etienne Boudreaux bought a Spanish land grant two miles south of Thibodaux in 1785 — one of thousands of Acadians expelled from Nova Scotia who made their way to southern Louisiana. Joseph W. Tucker, a Virginian, bought the property in 1832 and built what became the largest sugar producer in Lafourche Parish. As many as 135 enslaved people lived and worked here before the Civil War. Union soldiers burned Tucker's main house. The mill stopped production in 1926. What survived is the largest 19th- and 20th-century sugar plantation complex in the United States. Creole cabins built circa 1845. Shotgun houses built circa 1895 to shelter workers after emancipation. The sugar mill, damaged during Hurricane Betsy in 1965, still stands in ruins. The Boudreaux family home from 1816 is the oldest structure on the property. Hurricane Ida destroyed more than a dozen buildings in 2021, but about 40 original structures remain. The place was preserved by neglect. The buildings are weathered, overgrown, exactly where they were left. There is no sanitized visitor experience — what you see is what a working sugar plantation community looked like. A general store at the entrance displays tools and farm implements used in the cultivation of sugarcane. The property is still a working sugarcane farm. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1978. Highway 308, two miles south of Thibodaux.