Louis Metoyer built Melrose Barn circa 1810 in the Creole style, and it is one of only two Creole barns still standing in Louisiana. Its single-room storage area is raised on piers and floored, and a French-style hipped roof extends to cover ground-level galleries. In the mid-19th century, the central storage room was extended to include the end galleries, and it was only one of several barns at Melrose over the years. Melrose, like many Southern plantations, grew cotton as its cash crop and used enslaved people to plant, cultivate, and harvest it. Labor was divided among plow gangs, hoe gangs, trash gangs, and skilled workers such as blacksmiths, carpenters, stock keepers, mechanics, house servants, washers, gardeners, nurses, and midwives, while an enslaved driver set the pace in the fields and kept order in the quarters. Enslaved families generally lived in one- or two-room cabins, often with fenced yards, animals, and separate vegetable gardens, under the watch of an overseer whose cabin stood nearby. Cotton planting usually began in April, cultivation continued until early July, and picking started in August, with fields commonly picked three times as cotton ripened from the ground up. In the off-season, beans, corn, peas, sweet potatoes, and other crops were tended, and harvested cotton was ginned or stored for later ginning. Cotton gins were valuable assets: in 1836 Seraphin Llorens charged $600.00 to build one, and in 1840 Augustin Metoyer owned two cotton gins valued at $1200 and $2000, along with a gristmill and a pounding mill. Louisiana's annual cotton crop totaled 375,000 bales in 1840 and had risen to nearly 800,000 bales by 1860, with the state producing and shipping to Europe almost one-third of all cotton exported from the United States. After the Civil War and emancipation, planters turned to tenant farming and sharecropping through federally created contracts under which families rented land and used the landowner's mules and equipment in exchange for a share of the crop. In the twentieth century, after John Henry died in 1918, Cammie Henry took over Melrose's management, and her son J.H. Henry left college to help her and managed the business until his death in 1969, expanding the pecan orchards and overseeing cotton production. As mechanization increased in the mid-1930s, the need for sharecroppers declined, though most Melrose sharecroppers and tenant farmers were Creoles, school classes stopped during harvest so children could work in the fields, some teachers picked cotton and tutored students, and workers were often paid in plantation-specific scrip or brass tokens redeemable only at the plantation store.