In February 1852, Henry Watkins Allen and William Nolan purchased the Westover Plantation.[3][4] Henry Watkins Allen had served as a brigadier general in the Confederate States Army during the American Civil War, as well as serving as the 17th Governor of Louisiana.[5][6] Three years later in 1855, the land was divided and split; with Nolan keeping the name Westover Plantation on his portion of land and Allen using the name Allendale for his portion of the property.[3]
Henry Watkins Allen (1855–1865)
The Allendale Plantation under Henry Watkins Allen grew to 2,027 acres (820 ha), with 627 acres (254 ha) farmed.[7] Allen owned 125 enslaved African Americans.[8][9] Allen built his own railroad, which had been headquartered in what is now the town of Port Allen.[8]
During the American Civil War (1861–1865), parts of the Allendale Plantation had burned, including the Allendale Mill.[10][11] Allen had moved to Mexico art the war in 1865, and a year later he died on April 22, 1866, in Mexico City,[12] and as a result the Allendale Plantation held many owners after his death.[3]
Kahao family (starting in 1882)
In 1882, the plantation was purchased by brothers John Kahao and Martin James Kahao, formerly from Kansas.[3] The Kahao family bought up smaller neighboring plots of land, in order to grow the total land size.[3] The Allendale Plantation records showed that after 1908, many of the laborers were still being paid in tokens and merchandise checks instead of cash, which went against Federal law changes.[13] The Kahao family operated it as a sugar mill into the 1930s.[3]
Architecture
The Allendale Plantation Historic District is the name used by the National Register of Historic Places (NRHP), and it includes 15 wood-framed structures that were once part of the Allendale Plantation.[3] Some 13 of the 15 structures were former residences on the property, as well as a church and an office building.[3] The plantation manor house and the sugar mill have long since been destroyed.[3] In January 1887, the nearby Westover Plantation's main residence had a fire and burned down by accident, when they were trying to use fire to clear nearby weeds.[14][15]
Multiple cabins built between 1870 and 1900 are found on the site, they were once used by sharecropping laborers.[3] The cabins were generally built as four-rooms that were occupied by a single family.[3] The West Baton Rouge Museum has had one of the Allendale Plantation slave cabins onsite since 1976 (once owned by Allen, pre-1865) and the museum offers a narrative history.[16][9] In 2016 and 2020, the West Baton Rouge Museum narrative tour featuring Allendale Plantation been criticized for being biased and narrow in scope.[16][9]
The Allendale Church was built for laborers, and the office on the property held all of the related operations paperwork.[3] Most of the plantation buildings were moved often, due to flooding of the area.[3]
As of 1996, there were only six remaining examples of the sugar plantation complexes and systems in southern Louisiana.[3]
Morgan Dawson, Sarah (1913). A Confederate Girl's Diary. Houghton Mifflin Company. ISBN9780557358915. - The A Confederate Girl's Diary (1913) book has accounts of seeing the explosion of the CSS Arkansas from the Westover Plantation, during the America Civil War.
