melrose plantation

We were very impressed with this beautiful home and grounds and the interesting story behind it. The tour guides are absolutely top notch and at least one of them is related to past owners of this estate. The grounds consist of not only the main house but numerous other buildings, homes, a gift shop and beautiful oak trees and flowers. If you visit Melrose Plantation you will definitely enjoy it!

We were staying in Natchitoch and decided to go visit some of the historic plantations in the area. This is a great one to visit,. It is a guided tour and the tour guide was very knowledgeable and interesting. I really enjoyed that this plantation was where the artist Clementine Hunter once lived and we learned a lot about her background and got to see some of her original primitive art and paintings. the grounds were beautiful . Really enjoyed the day there.

Jeffrey was our tour leader and you could tell how much he loves what he does! He was very knowlegeable about the plantation, its owners, the history and the artwork of Clementine Hunter, who was a cook at the plantation and Louisiana's most celebrated primitive artist. Just getting to see some of Ms Hunter's art was incredible...not just paintings, but a quilt she made and a tapestry she made! The tour of the grounds and the main house was quite enjoyable.

Unlike the tour guides at the last three plantations we've just visited, our tour guide at Melrose was authentic, a wealth of information, and understandably proud of Melrose's story. She is descended from the French man and the slave woman who built the house. Melrose is off the beaten path, out in the countryside – quiet and with plenty of outbuildings as well as "The Big House." Ask for Miss Betty as your tour guide, and you'll receive a lovely Creole explanation of Melrose's story. Glitzy, this place is not: just authentic.

The Melrose Plantation is a must see for history and art buffs. As with other aspects of history, there are conflicting stories that some refer to as legend related to how the plantation started. According to some sources (you should do some Google searches to read the various versions), Louis Juchereau de St. Denis, the commander of the French fort in Natchitoches, bought a slave named Marie Therese Coincoin, (born in 1742,) along with some of her children. She was later sold along with some of her children to Thomas Pierre Metoyer who started the plantation now called Melrose Plantation. It appears that Metoyer and Marie Therese Coincoin had children together and that he subsequently freed her and all of her children. Although there is disagreement as to whether Ms. Coincoin was given land grants, her sons were given land grants and according to the excellent guide on our tour, the descendents of the Metoyers live all around the area where the plantation is located. Our guide who was 80 years old in October, 2014 provided an excellent tour and told us she was born on the plantation or nearby and is a descendent of the Metoyers and has been working for years giving tours. She emphasized the historical importance of a plantation run by Creole people of color as it is an important part of the history of the area.One interesting point is that from what we gathered about references to the African house and references to a slave jail, it appears that while the Plantation was run by Creoles, there were slaves on the plantation doing most of the manual labor prior to the Civil War. But in the 1840's with difficulties in the economy and financing, the plantation was auctioned off and purchased by Anglo owners. Over the years the land changed hands several more times.Around 1900, the plantation was purchased by John Hampton and Cammie Garrett Henry, a well-educated, wealthy woman, who was a patron of the arts. "Miss Cammie" as she was called in the community invited artists, writers, and others from far and wide to come and live at the plantation as long as they were working, according to our guide. In the 1940's, the guide said there was a woman who had been both a field hand and a cook at the plantation among other duties, named Clementine Hunter. She was uneducated and illiterate. According to the story, one day she saw some tubes of paint that had almost been used up and had been thrown in a trash can. She asked the painter if she could have them and an old brush left there. He told her she could have them and she told him she would "mark him a painting." The next day she presented him a painting on an old window shade and said it was for him. He looked at it and asked her where she got it. She said she had "marked it for him." She said she had worked all night marking it for him. He told her that the work was really good and that she should do more of it. From then on, Clementine Hunter painted on everything she could get her hands on. The guide said that if a shingle fell off the roof, she would "mark a painting" on it. She has been recognized as one of the most famous of the folk art or primitive art painters. She was extremely prolific and painted on every medium she could find. She reportedly painted thousands of paintings and sold them from the front door of her little house on the plantation for as little as 25 cents each. But before she died, she was selling them for hundreds of dollars. (One measure of how famous she has become is that the FBI convicted at least one local man who forged her paintings and sold them for thousands of dollars and that conviction was in 2011.) Some people feel Clementine Hunter is more famous now than Grandma Moses, another folk art painter. It is worth the price of the admission for the tour just to see the original paintings that are still part of the exhibit at the plantation. Although she never put titles on her paintings, she always told the story of what the painting was about. An unexpected surprise is the second floor of the building called the African House where Clementine Hunter was asked to paint a mural around the walls. The original murals have been removed, but replicas have been painted and are on display now as they would have looked when Ms. Hunter painted them. The guide described each painting and what Clementine Hunter described as the story behind each scene. These are great paintings and the stories are more important as you get a visual and oral history of what life was like on the plantation for Clementine Hunter. Just to add an interesting note that surprised us, a local legend is that Clementine Hunter was born on what was then called Hidden Hill Plantation about 7 miles down the Cane River from the Melrose Plantation. Hidden Hill was a terrible place for slaves and is supposed to have been the inspiration Harriet Beecher Stowe used for her book, Uncle Tom's Cabin. We drove down the road to find this plantation which sells pecans and it is apparently now called the "Little Eva" plantation, after a character in Uncle Tom's Cabin. This book was one of the most influential book sold in the 19th century that helped promote the Abolitionist movement that helped destroy government sanctioned slavery in the United States. This was the best tour we had on our trip to Natchitoches. You have to drive down the river and spend time for the tour, but if I only had time for one plantation tour, this would be it.

Our 50 travelers thoroughly enjoyed this tour. Very good guides and we Loved hearing about world famous Clementine Hunter. This was a working plantation. we could have spent more time there it was so enjoyable.

despite some chilly weather in Louisiana on the 24th of December, we enjoyed a very informative tour of the plantation. My mom had always wanted to go so when we were visiting over the holiday, we visited and she loved it.

I really loved my tour of this site with our tour guide Sue. It was an interesting to see the varying architectural styles of the buildings. There are very distinct changes that were made in the 20th century but you can still see traces of the 19th century architecture as well. I very much appreciated the Clementine Hunter history and seeing the works that aren't being restored. The history of the plantation is very interesting.

if you are around natchitoches louisiana this is a great way to kill some time. the tour was fun and you get to see some of the paintings by clementine hunter.

We were just there on Friday, July 11. The plantation is beautiful, a little hot on the inside, but that's OK. I guess the a/c wasn't as powerful as I thought it would be - that might be the only complaint I would have. The young man giving the tour was knowledgeable about the house and the surrounding grounds, and he told us many things about each room we visited. We saw Clementine Hunter's paintings, and he told us about her and her work. If you are the kind of traveler who likes going into old houses and looking around, this is a good place to visit. We were there in the afternoon, couldn't be helped - that's just the way our trip was scheduled, but I'd go in the morning when it is cooler.

Make sure to hire a tour guide for your visit. We got Sue, a lovely woman who used to work in hospitality at LSU and has a deep knowledge of the history and people of this plantation. We spent about an hour with her and were thoroughly informed by her fascinating stories. We loved seeing Clementine Hunter's paintings and one mural hanging in the big house, though we were disappointed that the other murals were off-site, being cleaned and restored. If you want to see those, check with the staff before going to see if they're back. Make sure to visit the gift shop as well, where there are paintings by Hunter's grandson for sale. We bought two and are happy to have them as a memento of our visit.

We loved our visit to the Melrose Plantation, even though it was a spur of the moment trip and by the time we arrived to the property itself we had missed the last tour of the day. We did get a chance to walk around the grounds themselves and that alone gave us the feeling of history and what the people who had once walked the grounds in another time had gone through. My Sister, got a chance to return to the plantation and actually take the tour.

Very informative and interesting tour about this gorgeous antebellum home and plantation. Lovely grounds.

Very good guide from Houston Texas made our tour interesting but not to long. I had heard of Clementine the artist on Antigues Roadshow but didn't know this was her home. Property is not part of the parks system but is private so there is a small few for the tour but well worth it.

The last of our antebellum house visits on our USA trip this year, and this was a good one. We were escorted round by a descendant of the original freed slave that started this plantation so she was very knowledgeable on the history of the house and estate. Lovely grounds with lots of other small buildings including the first house before the big house was built. A few miles outside Natchitoches but lots to see and photograph along the road. Well worth a visit to this house.