A few miles down river, Ambrose LeCompte established Magnolia Plantation in 1835, but its early history reached back to colonial Louisiana, when the LeCompte family received a French-era land grant on Cane River in the 1750s that laid the foundation for a cotton plantation unrivaled in the region. Two hundred seventy-five enslaved persons, housed in seventy cabins, cultivated cotton and other crops, and as many as twenty-four of the cabins were two-room brick structures with a family or group in each room. In 1852, Ambrose's daughter Atala and son-in-law Matthew Hertzog took over operations, and by 1860 the family owned more enslaved people and produced more cotton on over 6,000 acres than anyone in the parish. The Civil War devastated the plantation, and during the Red River Campaign of April 1864 retreating Union troops burned the main house. After the Civil War and through the 1960s, Magnolia Plantation remained a successful farming operation through the work of descendants of enslaved workers who stayed and of other families who came as tenant farmers, sharecroppers, and day laborers, including the LaCour, Metoyer, Moran, Rachal, Verchers, Cyriaque, Middleton, and Anthony families, whose descendants remain. Their lives continued to revolve around the cabins, which after Emancipation were converted to single-family tenant housing with vegetable and flower gardens and fenced yards for chickens and other fowl. Eight cabins of the Magnolia Quarters have survived. Though times were tough and life was hard, residents visited neighbors, played cards and games, enjoyed music, and children rode horses and played baseball in local leagues. The shift from hand labor and draft animals to machines began in the 1930s, the last day laborers moved out of the remaining cabins in the early 1970s, the National Park Service acquired the outbuildings in 1997, and the LeCompte-Hertzog family continues to operate the privately owned property, including the main house rebuilt in the 1890s, as a working plantation.