Leaving Maison Chenal

Twelve years ago, when I traveled from Baton Rouge to Jarreau, Louisiana, to interview Pat and Jack Holden at their property on Chenal Road, I experienced what I call a Magical Day—suffused with the feeling that I had stepped back in time. 

My welcoming hosts gave me a tour of their houses, outbuildings, and gardens; provided a beautiful lunch of gumbo z’herbes and bread pudding; and sent me home with a vintage box of eggs from their free-roaming chickens.

The Holdens exemplified those I call Antiquarians, people who are in love with the past. What distinguishes them is passion—a love of history and a desire to inhabit the mysterious realm of the long-ago. Applying the passion of collectors and the care of scholars to re-create the past as authentically as possible, they have created a slice of colonial Louisiana set among ancient oaks. 

After more than thirty years in their re-creation of Creole Louisiana, Pat and Jack have decided to sell it all: 75 acres of land, 4 houses, 8 outbuildings, and 1,400 items of furniture, art, and objects—in the words of the Holdens, tout ensemble. 

That expression, meaning all together, is one the Holdens learned back in the 1960s, when they took courses with architect and ardent preservationist Samuel Wilson, Jr., at Tulane University in New Orleans.

As Pat, nearly 80, and Jack, 82, have discovered, finding a buyer who shares their vision isn’t easy. “The ideal buyer is somebody with a real interest in Louisiana’s material culture and the funds to keep it together,” said Pat in a recent telephone interview. “We can sell it piece by piece, but we don’t want to do that.”

New Orleans realtor Peter Patout listed the property last July. “This is a world-class property,” he said. “It is the only property in the world that portrays eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Louisiana, the French and Acadian culture, touching on many other countries. There is nothing like this anywhere in the world.” The estate is listed at $3,850,000.

The Holdens first caught the fever while living in New Orleans in the 1960s while Jack attended medical school. “We took courses under Sam Wilson and F. Monroe Labouisse, Jr. [former chairman of the Vieux Carré Commission, who taught the history of Louisiana architecture for nearly fifty years],” said Pat. “We decided we liked the early period, the real French. We started looking for furniture. Jack just has a natural eye for old things. I study hard, and he has the instincts.” 

Later they moved to Baton Rouge, where Jack practiced until his retirement in 2002. (Their three children now all live with their families on a Highland Road compound in Baton Rouge, where Pat and Jack have built their own house.)

In the ‘seventies, inspired by their classes in New Orleans, the Holdens decided to search for an old house to restore. “We’re interested not in the grand, Tara houses but in the more vernacular architecture, the Creole French expression of the people who lived there,” said Pat. Added Jack, “The antebellum period has been done.”

“We’re interested not in the grand, Tara houses but in the more vernacular architecture, the Creole French expression of the people who lived there,” said Pat. Added Jack, “The antebellum period has been done.”

They bought property along Bayou Chenal in 1974. “This area has all kinds of stories to tell—architecturally, geographically, and historically,” said Pat. They looked for a house next and found it in 1975, eleven miles away on False River. “It had been abandoned and then sold to be torn down,” said Pat. “They had already started taking the boards out of the ceiling when we came along and bought it.”

[Read this: LSU Rural Life Museum acquires a house that subverts Southern stereotypes.]

The house is a raised cottage of four rooms with front and back galleries. They moved the house to their property, christened it Maison Chenal, and spent several years making it livable. They enclosed the downstairs, originally used for storage, to add a kitchen, dining area, and guest room. 

“The house was restored incrementally,” said Pat. “We had to work around the Pointe Coupee lifestyle, such as stopping while the workers went hunting. It was like that book A Year in Provence. You embrace that life and the people. We became friends, and I loved every day working with them.” Earl Major served as the main contractor and carpenter for Maison Chenal, while Cookie Honoré, brother of Lieutenant General Russel Honoré, was the main carpenter on the LaCour House, purchased by Holdens in 1996. “They were both joys to work with. This is all part of their heritage. They considered it a challenge to their skills if something wasn’t plumb.”

Over the years the Holdens brought in an overseer’s house that they use as a workspace, an outdoor kitchen and washhouse, a garçonnière, a pigeonnier, and a privy. The house is surrounded by a split-cypress fence made from old, lichen-covered pieux, which they collected from all over the state “for years and years.” They created period gardens—a formal parterre-style layout in the front and a potager or kitchen garden in the back, along with an arbor of muscadine vines and Confederate jasmine. 

Pea-gravel paths wind among the plantings. There’s even a plantation bell tower and a house for the chickens that roam free, scratching, squawking, and producing delicious eggs. Over the years, they added a pair of geese named Thelma and Louise, a horse named Zachary and his pal Lightning the mule, and a neighbor’s cows that were pastured on their land.

Using period books, letters, and diaries, the Holdens found historic documentation for everything from teacup placement to plant selection. The arrangement of five cups and saucers on a mantel is based on a drawing in Denis Diderot’s encyclopedia of French culture (1751-77). The use of muscadine vine is backed up by Antoine Le Page du Pratz’s 1758 history of Louisiana, as well as a letter written by an Ursuline nun in 1727. On their front gallery, they  reproduced the effect described by Joseph Holt Ingraham in 1835: “the Columns of the buildings were festooned with golden jasmine.”

“I’ve kept receipts and notes,” said Pat. “I have containers of 4x6 index cards from our research, with quotes on Indian baskets or foodways or memoirs.”

In 1996, they acquired the 1760s Nicholas LaCour House. The massive building, which architectural historians call one of the oldest in the Lower Mississippi Valley, had been moved from Pointe Coupee to New Iberia where, said Pat, “it languished for years.” The restored two-room house was a childhood home of the late Lindy Boggs. It now sits across the road from Maison Chenal. 

The Holdens left one wall partly open to show the bousillage (mud and moss) construction; another was whitewashed as it was originally. “We’re trying to let the building be an architectural document, not cover it up,” said Pat. “To let you see the architectural tool marks.”

The main room holds armoires and three long walnut tables, two originally from the Ursuline Convent in New Orleans, dating to about 1750. The third is a copy made for the Holdens by furniture maker David Broussard. Thirty “Creole” chairs surround the tables; Greg Arceneaux copied them from an original owned by the Holdens. “One of my favorite tricks with museum curators is to say, ‘Pick out the old chair,’” said Jack.

The Holdens have created a unique treasure, a tribute to the days when the French settled in the area. Pat called it “frontier reality with a French flair.” 

[Read this: The Petticoat Rebellion of 18th-Century Louisiana.]

“That’s the way I think the whole place can be described,” she said. “The juxtaposition and combination of the plain and the sumptuous. Take the rafters on the gallery—you have utilitarian shingles, but the rafter has a wonderful, swirly, curved turn on the end juxtaposed to that real, no-nonsense shingle.”

Their passion for the past was most concentrated in the Maison Chenal. The Holdens believe the house, whose original construction they date to 1790, was occupied by Benjamin Poydras de la Lande, a nephew of one of the largest landowners in the parish. “This land once belonged to Julien Poydras,” said Pat. 

The Holdens have created a unique treasure, a tribute to the days when the French settled in the area. Pat called it “frontier reality with a French flair.” 

Portraits by such Louisiana artists as Jose Francisco de Salazar and Jean Joseph Vaudechamp hang throughout the house, including a Vaudechamp of an unknown woman whom Jack calls “the Mona Lisa of Louisiana” because of her enigmatic smile.   

As they pursued their shared passion, the Holdens found they excelled in different areas. “Jack is most knowledgeable about the furniture,” said Pat. “I was most interested in the architecture of the house.” 

Jeremy Simien's growing art collection focuses on rare depictions of Creoles of color.]

About fifty pieces of their furniture are included in the massive tome Furnishing Louisiana: Creole and Acadian Furniture, 1735–1835, co-written by Jack and published by The Historic New Orleans Collection in 2010. 

One piece, a c. 1812 cherry-wood armoire with an oval inlay of an American eagle surrounded by eighteen stars, is thought to represent Louisiana as the eighteenth state admitted to the Union. “This is probably the most significant armoire we have,” said Jack. “The inlay is the great seal of the United States.” The piece will be in the exhibitition Chasing the Butterfly Man at the Louisiana State Museum, which opens in November. 

All the furniture in the show was built with the characteristic double dovetail, or butterfly, joint. Experts haven’t yet figured out who the maker was. “New Orleans cabinet makers were known locally but they just didn’t sign their pieces,” said Jack. “My personal feeling is that the Butterfly Man was a man named Dewhurst.”

Pat summed up their consuming passion: “What fascinates us about old things—it’s not that we want to go back to the past, but that we need the physical things, the objects, to remind us that we’re part of a continuum. Everything they did affects us, just as what we do will affect the future.”

The Holdens hope the right buyer or group of buyers is out there. They would like to see the property used as a center for study and research.

“We explored making it a center for the study of the material culture of Louisiana, like the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts in Winston-Salem, North Carolina,” said Pat. “To have a center for study, for research into the early colonial period and prior to the Civil War, the development of Louisiana’s history, using material culture as a way to tell that story. That would be wonderful.”  

Ruth Laney first wrote about the Holdens in 2007. She can be reached at ruthlaney@cox.net. For more information about the Maison Chenal property, go to peterpatout.com.