Magnolia Plantation was established by Ambrose LeComte in 1835, but its history reached back to colonial Louisiana, when the LeComte or LeCompte family received a French-era land grant in the 1750s that laid the foundation for a cotton plantation unrivaled in the region. Rare original outbuildings remained where generations of the same families of workers and owners lived and worked, and people there produced the wealth that supported Magnolia for more than two centuries. A structure likely first built as a hospital for the enslaved was later inhabited by the Planter family after 275 enslaved persons, housed in 70 cabins, cultivated cotton and other crops. As many as 24 cabins were two-room brick structures, with a family in each room. In 1852, Ambrose's daughter Atala and her husband Matthew Hertzog took over operation of Magnolia, and by 1860 the family owned more enslaved people and produced more cotton on over 6,000 acres than anyone else in the parish. The Civil War devastated the plantation, and during the 1864 Red River Campaign retreating U.S. troops burned the main house. After the Civil War and through the 1960s, Magnolia remained a successful farming operation through the labor 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, Vercher, Cyriaque, Middleton, and Anthony families, whose descendants remained. Life continued to center on the cabins, which were converted to single-family tenant housing with gardens and fenced yards for chickens and other fowl. Times were hard, but residents visited neighbors, played cards and games, enjoyed music, rode horses, and played baseball in local leagues, including a team called the Black Magnolias. The shift from hand labor and draft animals to machines began in the 1930s, the last day laborers left the cabins in the early 1970s, the National Park Service acquired the outbuildings in 1997, and the LeComte-Hertzog family continued to operate the privately owned property, including the main house rebuilt in the 1890s, as a working plantation.