Photograph as originally submitted to this page in the Historical Marker Database www.HMdb.org. Click on photo to resize in browser. Scroll down to see metadata.

Photographer: Lee Hattabaugh
Taken: November 17, 2010
Caption: Kent Plantation House Marker
Additional Description: Located near the visitor center, this plaque provides additional information about the Kent House.

Kent Plantation House
Pierre Baillio, son of a French soldier at the fort in Natchitoches, and his wife, Magdelaine Lacour, had this raised Creole house built on a 1795 Spanish land grant. One of only four such homes remaining in Louisiana built, not as a cottage, but a substantial house from the outset, it was completed in 1800. Robert and Mary Hynson, the second owners, added its distinctive Greek Revival pavilions in the 1840s. They also gave the property the name Kent Plantation, for Mr. Hynson’s birthplace in Kent County, Maryland.

Kent House survived the devastation of Alexandria and much of the Red River countryside during the Civil War. Thanks to the hard work of a community group, The Friends of Kent House, it survived a 1963 demolition plan as well, by being moved two blocks to its present site for restoration. In 1971 Kent House took its place on the National Register of Historic Places, and opened to the public in 1975. With its complex of typical dependencies, the site – still part of the original Baillio plantation – now depicts the history of central Louisiana from 1795 through 1855.
Submitted: November 22, 2010, by Lee Hattabaugh of Capshaw, Alabama.
Database Locator Identification Number: p137561
File Size: 0.250 Megabytes

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