Submitted by FHMaster on Sat, 12/17/2016 - 16:20

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The spiral staircase in Live Oaks Plantation in Iberville Parish is suspended from the curved inner wall, without any support from the floor. Learn more »

Live Oaks Plantation is listed on the National Register of Historic Places; it is a private home and not open to the public. One of the live oak trees on the property is listed by the Live Oak Society as being among the largest and oldest in the United States.

Charles H. Dickinson, along with his fourteen-year-old bride, Anna Turner, came to Louisiana from Tennessee in 1828, almost two dozen years after his father died in a duel with Andrew Jackson in 1806. The land was deeded to Dickinson by his guardian and maternal grandfather, Capt. Joseph Erwin, whose family owned large tracts of land in Iberville Parish. Dickinson developed a sugar plantation on the land, and in 1838 he built Live Oaks, a two-and-a-half-story house of pegged cypress, perhaps incorporating an earlier structure of 1828. The house has a two-story gallery with square columns and a central entrance opening to a twenty-foot-wide central hall. At the rear of this hall, where it widens to twenty-four feet, is a spiral staircase suspended from the curved inner wall, without any support from the floor. The house stands beside Bayou Grosse Tete, near Rosedale.

Of the two dependencies flanking the house at the rear, one originally was a combination smokehouse and slave quarters (only one room of this brick structure survives); the other was a kitchen, although the present building is a reconstruction on the old foundation. A rectangular brick chapel to the left of the house, built around 1840 for enslaved workers—and the only surviving plantation chapel in Louisiana—has an entrance on the gable end and three windows along each side. It was later used as a schoolhouse and as an Episcopal chapel until the Church of the Nativity was built. Behind the chapel, a brick tomb holds iron caskets cast in the form of the human body, with sliding metal doors that could be opened to view the deceased’s face through a small glass area. The Smithsonian Institution dated the caskets to circa 1830, and they are said to have been shipped from Spain to Cuba and then to New Orleans. 

 Adapted from Karen Kingsley’s Buildings of Louisiana, part of the Buildings of the United States series commissioned by the Society of Architectural Historians (www.sah.org) and published by Oxford University Press.

Historic Significance: Architecture/Engineering

Architect, builder, or engineer: Unknown

Architectural Style: No Style Listed

Area of Significance:

Architecture Period of Significance: 1825-1849

Owner: Private

Historic Function: Agriculture/Subsistence, Domestic

Historic Sub-function: Agricultural Outbuildings, Single Dwelling

Current Function: Domestic

Current Sub-function: Single Dwelling

The first home was constructed  in 1828 by Charles Dickinson, Live Oaks Plantation consists of the plantation house and gardens with a slave chapel and the remains of brick slave quarters on the grounds. The present house was built by 1838 by Charles H. Dickinson and is believed to have incorporated an earlier structure.  The land was deeded to him by his grandfather Captain Joseph Irwin, who becane his guardian upon the death of his father.

Location
Rosedale
State
GeoCoord
N 30° 26.600 W 091° 27.333
Owners
Charles Henry Dickinson II
Charles Henry Dickinson III
Founded
1838
Status
Active
Address
Louisiana Highway 77 (North) Rosedale, LA USA 70772