Lombard Plantation

In 1825, Marie Azelie Zeringue, wife of Joseph Guillaume Lombard, purchased the land on which this house stands from the Macarty family. The house was built by her father-in-law, French immigrant Louis Lombard. The property was a working plantation, probably raising sugarcane, and it is thought that it was worked by hired labor, including free blacks and Irish immigrants. Raised on brick piers, the one-story house has a front gallery carried on slender wooden columns, and a hipped roof with a slight uptilt along its perimeter and a small dormer. Norman trussing in the attic suspends a roof system over a large floor area with only two interior supports. The house has a Creole plan of four rooms, with a brick chimney between each pair, and a rear space between cabinets. In 1833, the Lombards sold the house, which then had a succession of owners. A bill of sale of 1864 indicates the property had a brick kitchen, a livery, a stable, and other dependencies suitable for a working plantation, and two enslaved workers (despite the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863). Over the following decades the plantation was reduced in size and the surrounding area became increasingly built up and poor. But poverty allowed the house to survive with its interior relatively untouched, including some of the stenciled designs of moons and crescents in the former dining room. In 1991, historian Frederick Starr purchased the house and some adjacent land and began a long process of restoration, with the advice of architect Eugene D. Cizek, contractor Jack Stewart, and architect Rick Fifield. The kitchen house, which burned down in 1880, was reconstructed based on an 1843 plan and the garden was reconstructed based on mid-nineteenth-century garden plans, all in the Notarial Archives.