9 Best Sights in Side Trips from New Orleans, Louisiana

John James Audubon did a major portion of his Birds of America studies in this 100-acre park, and the three-story Oakley Plantation House is where Audubon tutored the young Eliza Pirrie, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. James Pirrie, who owned the house. The simple—even spartan—interior contrasts sharply with the extravagances of many of the River Road plantations and demonstrates the Puritan influence in this region. The grounds, too, recall the English penchant for a blending of order and wilderness in their gardens. You must follow a short, peaceful walking path to reach the house from the parking lot. A state-run museum at the start of the path provides an informative look at plantation life as it was lived in this region 200 years ago. A permanent exhibit tells the story of the slaves who lived on this site—including many of their names—and the grounds include a pair of authentic slave cabins brought here from another plantation.

The closest intact plantation to New Orleans is also the oldest intact plantation in the entire lower Mississippi Valley. It's a simple West Indies–style house, built in 1787–90 by an enslaved builder of mixed race for the Destrehan family; it's typical of the homes built by the earliest planters in the region. It is notable for the hand-hewn cypress timbers used in its construction and for the insulation in its walls, made of bousillage, a mixture of horsehair, Spanish moss, oyster shells, and mud. A costumed guide leads a 45-minute tour through the house furnished with period antiques, starting every half-hour. "The Unheard Voices of the German Coast Tour" is a special two-hour tour offered on Fridays and Saturdays at 10:15 am and 1:15 pm, focusing on the marginalized people of the region—especially enslaved Africans. The grounds also hold exhibits showcasing documents signed by former Presidents, a history of the extraordinary 1811 Slave Revolt, and original slave cabins from a nearby plantation. Demonstrations of crafts such as weaving, barrel-making, or open-hearth cooking occur regularly, and an annual fall festival with music, crafts, and food is held the second weekend in November.

Telling the story of four generations of free and enslaved Creole women, this is a more intimate and better-documented presentation of Creole plantation life than most properties on River Road. The narrative of the guides is built on first-person accounts, estate records, and original artifacts from the Locoul family, who built the simple, Creole-style house in 1805. Laura Locoul, whose great-grandparents founded the estate, wrote a detailed memoir of plantation life, family fights, and the management of slaves. The information from Laura's memoir and the original slave cabins and other outbuildings (workers on the plantation grounds lived in the cabins into the 1980s) provide rare insights into slavery in south Louisiana. The plantation gift shop stocks a large selection of literature by and about slaves and slavery in south Louisiana and the United States. Senegalese slaves at Laura are believed to have first told folklorist Alcée Fortier the tales of Br'er Rabbit; his friend, Joel Chandler Harris, used the stories in his Uncle Remus tales. Tours take place approximately every 40 minutes.

Touring the South's largest existing antebellum mansion will give you an appreciation of the grandeur of the area's plantation homes, but it is lacking in the information it provides about slavery's central role in the construction and maintenance of the estate. Built in 1859, Nottoway's mansion is Italianate in style, with 64 rooms, 22 columns, and 200 windows. The crowning achievement of architect Henry Howard, it was saved from destruction during the Civil War by a Northern officer (a former guest of the owners, Mr. and Mrs. John Randolph). An idiosyncratic, somewhat rambling layout reflects the individual tastes of the original owners and includes a grand ballroom, famed in these parts for its crystal chandeliers and hand-carved columns. As an alternative to the 45-minute guided tour, visitors also can opt for a self-guided and self-paced audio tour. You can stay at Nottaway overnight, and a formal restaurant serves breakfast, lunch, and dinner daily. The plantation is 2 miles north of its namesake, the town of White Castle (you'll understand how the town got its name when you see this vast, white mansion, which looks like a castle).

The most famous of all the antebellum homes in Louisiana is a darling of Hollywood, having appeared in major movies and television productions. Built between 1837 and 1839 by Jacques T. Roman, a French Creole sugar planter from New Orleans, Oak Alley is an outstanding example of Greek Revival architecture and is now owned and operated by the Oak Alley Foundation. The 28 stately oak trees that line the drive and give the columned plantation its name were planted in the early 1700s by an earlier settler. A guided tour introduces you to the grand interior of the manor, but be aware that you're unable to book specific times for your tour, so you may want to arrive early in the day to avoid lengthy lines. Leave time to explore the expansive grounds and visit an excellent slavery exhibit where regularly scheduled conversations with staff members tell the lives of those owned and kept on the plantation, as well as their lives after emancipation. Other exhibits cover the history of sugarcane in the region, the Civil War, and much more. A number of late-19th-century cottages behind the main house provide simple overnight accommodations, and a restaurant is open daily from 8:30 am to 3 pm.

This Georgian-style house was built for Governor Huey P. Long in 1930, and eight other governors lived here thereafter until 1962. The story goes that Long instructed the architect to design his home to resemble the White House, representing Long's unrealized ambition to live in the real one. Notable features on the guided tour include Long's bedroom and a secret staircase. This historic house museum also serves as the Preserve Louisiana headquarters and functions as a venue for special events.

The opulent, beautifully restored house at Rosedown dates from 1835. The original owners, Martha and Daniel Turnbull, spent their honeymoon in Europe; Mrs. Turnbull fell in love with the gardens she saw there and had the land at Rosedown laid out even as the house was under construction. She spent the rest of her life lovingly maintaining some 28 acres of exquisite formal gardens. The State of Louisiana owns Rosedown, and the beauty of the restored manor, including the furniture (90% of which is original), can be appreciated on an hour-long tour led by park rangers that—while thorough in some respects—mostly glosses over the lives of the slaves who lived on the property. Be sure to allow ample time for roaming the grounds after the tour.

An intriguing variation on the standard plantation style, with galleries resembling the decks of a ship, the San Francisco Plantation seems to have inspired a new architectural term: "Steamboat Gothic." The house, completed in 1856, was once called "St. Frusquin," a pun on a French slang term, sans fruscins, which means "without a penny in my pocket"—the condition its owner, Valsin Marmillion, found himself in after paying exorbitant construction costs. Valsin's father, Edmond Bozonier Marmillion, had begun the project, and according to lore, his design for the house was inspired by the steamboats he enjoyed watching along the Mississippi. Upon his father's death, Valsin and his German bride, Louise von Seybold, found themselves with a plantation on their hands. Unable to return to Germany, Louise brought German influence to south Louisiana instead. The result was an opulence rarely encountered in these parts: ceilings painted in trompe-l'oeil, hand-painted toilets with primitive flushing systems, and cypress painstakingly rendered as marble and English oak. Tour guides impart the full fascinating story on the 45-minute tour through the main house and attempt to tell the parallel story of the enslaved population forced to labor in the house and throughout the plantation. An authentic one-room schoolhouse and a slave cabin have been installed on the grounds, which you can tour at your leisure.

One of the South's best-known plantation homes was built on the bank of Bayou Teche using slave labor for the wealthy sugar planter David Weeks in 1834. In 1917 his descendant William Weeks Hall conducted one of the first historically conscious restorations of a plantation home, also preserving truckloads of documents that helped explain day-to-day life here for the Weeks family, as well as for many of the people they enslaved. The result is one of the most fascinating tours in Louisiana, taking place hourly, every day except Sundays. Weeks Hall willed the property to the National Trust for Historic Preservation in 1958, and each year the trust selects a different historical topic to emphasize. Surrounded by 2½ acres of lush gardens and moss-draped oaks, the two-story rose-hue house has white columns, exterior staircases sheltered in cabinet-like enclosures, and a pitched roof pierced by dormer windows. The furnishings are 85% original to the house.