Cane River Creole National Historical Park was established by Congress in 1994 along with the Cane River National Heritage Area, and includes Oakland and Magnolia Plantations within a region recognized for its unique history, developed cultures, and progress into the present day. Magnolia Plantation, originally Magnolia Grove Plantation, was established by Ambrose LeComte II and his wife Julia Buard LeComte, with roots in eighteenth-century colonial Louisiana and in the LeComte family’s efforts to build agricultural holdings along the Cane River after Jean Baptiste LeComte I received a land grant on both sides of the river in 1753. Over the next eighty years the family expanded its holdings, and by 1860 Magnolia encompassed more than 6,000 acres, including 2,240 cultivated acres, where 275 enslaved persons raised cotton and corn and lived in seventy cabins, about twenty-four of them unusual brick two-room structures. After Ambrose and Julia’s daughters married into the Hertzog family, Mathew Henry Hertzog and Ursula Atala Hertzog took over management in 1852, and the Hertzog name became closely tied to Magnolia. The Civil War devastated the plantation and its families, and in 1864 retreating Union troops burned the main house. Afterward, the Hertzogs rebuilt while forging a new relationship with formerly enslaved workers, many of whom remained as tenants or day laborers, and Magnolia continued for the next century in a changed form, with a plantation store that served as both community center and source of debt, continued production of cotton, corn, and livestock, shrinking acreage through division and sale, mule-powered labor into the early twentieth century, and growing mechanization after the Great Depression that signaled the decline of plantation agriculture. The African American community nevertheless maintained a strong presence in the Cane River region, whose character was shaped by African, French, Native American, and Spanish traditions. Surviving features at Magnolia include the plantation store, probably built about 1873, with original furnishings and a role as a postwar commercial and social center; a Creole-style blacksmith shop that may predate the LeComte purchase of the property in 1824 and was in use from the 1840s; an 1840-1855 pigeonnier associated with status and food production; a building used as a slave hospital and later associated with the Hertzogs and with overseers; eight surviving brick slave and tenant cabins adapted after emancipation from housing two families to one; and a gin and press barn containing equipment ranging from as early as 1835 to as late as 1939, including a wooden screw cotton press and later gin and hydraulic press.