Changing Residents

This structure sheltered different plantation residents over time, including enslaved workers, the planter family, and plantation overseers. Historical records suggest it originally served as a hospital for enslaved laborers, where a nurse, likely an enslaved woman, probably attended patients with visits from a doctor. An 1851 entry by overseer W.B. Eddins recorded that Dannial the Black Smith from Armsteads side became sick on Thursday, was locked up in one end of the hospital, continued the medicine prescribed by the doctor, lived until Monday night, and died on the 24th. According to oral tradition, Matthew and Atala LeComte Hertzog moved into the building after the Main House was burned by U.S. forces during the 1864 Red River Campaign, and the hospital was enlarged to create more living space. The Hertzogs moved into the rebuilt Main House in 1897. From the late 1890s to the mid-1960s, overseers or farm managers including Edmund Delacorda, Henry Gallien, Leslie Gallien, and Telese Rachal lived here, until a resident overseer was no longer needed by the mid-1960s.

Montgomery, Louisiana · United States