Old Plauche Place / Ducournau Plantation

Old Plauche Place, also, Ducournau Plantation. . , (side 1) , This c. 1836 center hall Creole cottage is of poteaux sur sole, (hand-hewn pegged cypress sills on brick piers) and bousillage construction on the 1780s land grant to Claude Pierre Thomas Metoyer. The lower 68 acres given to a free woman of color, Coincoin, mother to his 10 Franco-African children, genesis to Isle Brevelle and builders of Melrose Plantation and St. Augustine Church. Pierre and his French wife, Marie Therese Buard, had three children who intermarried with the Prudhomme and Lambre families, genesis to the Cote Joyeuse. Pierre had 103 enslaved workers on this plantation in 1810. Pierre's granddaughter, Ophelia Prudhomme, acquired the land from her parents and married (twice widowed) the two sons of Gen. Jean Baptiste Plauche of the Battle of New Orleans. New Orleans cotton broker JB Plauche and Co. doing business with the (Continued on other side). , (side 2) , (Continued from other side). Prudhomme families and Magnolia Plantation. Her siblings owned Beau Fort, Cedar Bend, Cherokee and Oaklawn Plantations. Her grandfather Emmanuel Prudhomme built Oakland. Union and Confederate troops passed through the Old Plauche Place during the 1864 Red River Campaign, ascending March 30 and descending April 21 burning her baled cotton and gins, and removing her property. 78 of the 81 enslaved residents left with the advancing, and later retreating, Union troops. Her son Andrew Jackson Plauche and wife Estelle Ducournau left the place to the Ducournau family. As directed in the will of Andrew Jackson Plauche, Joe Plauche, a southern planter of color was a resident of the famed plantation from 1900 to 1946 employing returning veterans of World War I. In 1963 owner Jo Bryan Ducournau, whose father commissioned the “Good Darky” statue, renamed the place “Hope”.