Photo by Henry Cancienne
Ardoyne Plantation is still owned by the descendants of John Dalton Shaffer, who built this “little cottage” for his ailing wife. The home, built in the image of a Scottish castle, has twenty-one rooms, including seven bedrooms.
Historic homes, at least the ones that are really homes and not strictly museums, never get frozen in time. Each occupying generation leaves its mark, some more beneficial than others; but they all do the best they can. And succeeding generations, like the one taking up occupancy in the sugarcane plantation house called Ardoyne, must respect and honor the past while, at the same time, making the house their own. It’s an undertaking not for the fainthearted.
Ardoyne has remained with the family who built it since it was completed in 1894 by attorney and state senator John Dalton Shaffer, already the third generation of a sugar-planting family that found Terrebonne Parish was indeed the “good earth”—terre bonne—its soils rich, its climate suitably semitropical, its multitude of waterways ideal for transporting cane crops to market. Along this stretch of Little Bayou Black near Houma, the households were all related in the early days, by blood and by occupation: Crescent Farm, established by the first generation of Shaffers under South Carolinian patriarch William Alexander Shaffer, now a law office; magnificent Magnolia Plantation (est. 1834), the postwar home to second-generation Confederate captain John Jackson Shaffer and still in the family; Southdown Plantation, now a museum of area history, where the sugar mill was located and where a daughter of the Minor family married into the Krumbhaar family, and a granddaughter married into the Shaffers. Oh yes, and they were also related to George Washington, Robert E. Lee, and the last governor of the Louisiana Territory under Spanish rule.
Marvelous houses, all. But the most magical of them is Ardoyne. John Dalton Shaffer promised his ailing wife Julia he would build her a “little cottage” while she took an extended European cure. He then proceeded to provide the New Orleans architectural firm of W.C. Williams & Bros. with the image of a Scottish castle. The finished product, constructed of red cypress and pine cut on family property and sent to St. Louis for milling, has a soaring seventy-five-foot tower, bays, arches, fanciful Victorian gingerbread trim, and an architectural exuberance seen nowhere else in Bayou Country. The National Register of Historic Places proclaims it probably the state’s largest and most elaborate remaining example of rural Victorian Gothic.
The huge entrance doors open onto a sixty-foot stair hall with a sixteen-foot cove-molded ceiling, original painted treads on the immense carved staircase, barge-board walls papered with hand-stamped papers, and original Gilbert Stuart portraits of George Washington and his adopted daughter Nellie Custis. The hallway is flanked on one side by the ladies’ parlor, dining room, and kitchen, and on the other by the gentlemen’s parlor, unique octagonal plantation office, and screened mosquito porch opening from several bedrooms.
There are twenty-one rooms in all, including seven bedrooms, lit by original hanging gasoliers and heated by twelve fireplaces. Each generation has added to the fine furnishings and artwork—Prudent Mallard half-tester beds; Duncan Phyfe sideboard and china cabinets with china that belonged to President Millard Fillmore’s secretary of war (an uncle several times removed); barrister bookcases overflowing with vintage volumes; Alexander Drysdales and Elephant Folio Audubons; massive mirrors (one from a steamboat, another from New Orleans’ St. Charles Hotel).
And there are collections of everything under the sun: Chitimacha Indian baskets; more than three hundred travel souvenir spoons; beautiful needlework exquisitely executed by the current owner’s beloved grandmother and cypress knee dolls she dressed, frugally, using snippets of her own hair on their heads; half of a hogshead barrel used to ship sugar in 1849; tokens paid to workers good only in the plantation store; ledgers and correspondence and 1800s cookbooks; Newcomb pottery. On a wicker-backed wheelchair rest the well-worn boots of Uncle Benny, the requisite plantation ghost.
Alas, by the time young M. Lee Shaffer III and his wife Susan retired in 2008 from his Air Force career that took them around the world—from Korea to the Azores, Germany, California, Virginia, and Mississippi—to take up residence after his grandmother’s death at age ninety-three, many of Ardoyne’s furnishings were as worn as Uncle Benny’s boots. The upstairs, which had no electricity or plumbing, had for years been the repository of mountains of broken or discarded furniture, and the downstairs pieces showed plenty of wear and tear as well. One parlor chair had crashed to the floor when Antonio Banderas sat in it during filming for Crazy in Alabama. Restoration professionals brought in from New Orleans said “not in their lifetime,” so the Shaffers have learned to do it themselves.
The restoration was a massive undertaking, and one fraught with challenges. Difficult decisions had to be made—what to keep, what to toss, what to donate to museums—and adjustments became necessary, including how best to comfortably accommodate Lee’s elderly maiden aunt, a former parish librarian, who has lived in the house her entire life and still does.
But the current young generation of Shaffers felt an obligation to share this significant legacy, so they have opened the doors of Ardoyne to the public, doing so with an enthusiastic generosity of spirit but also the good sense to retain a private family life; after all, they live in the house. They restrict tours to three a day; as Lee put it, “We are using the history to tell the story, but also having the house livable.” Thousands of books have been donated to the Nicholls State University library; tons of important papers have gone to The Historic New Orleans Collection for preservation.
The upstairs has new wiring and plumbing and comfortable headquarters for private family life; and the young Shaffers, two of whose three sons are still at home, “love being near home and family.” Said Lee, “The South is one of the best places in the world. We loved Europe, where the people were good and lived their lives with fervor, especially the Azores where the farmers and townspeople would all come together to have small street bullfights, and they enjoyed beer and smoked sardines together. If you think about the way South Louisiana lives, you could see anyone from any of the rural European towns fitting in so well with the Louisiana culture.” Susan added, “We have been married almost thirty years and visited Ardoyne on many occasions. After traveling the world, moving to Little Bayou Black was like coming home for me. The residents of Terrebonne Parish are the most loving and welcoming in the world. They may ask who your mama is, but in the end, it doesn’t matter to them; they’ll still hug you, feed you, and call you chère.”
Visitors are flocking from many states and some foreign countries, but the most appreciative ones are locals who have for years marveled at the magical house but could only dream about what wonders the interior might hold. Now they can see for themselves, meet the family, hear the old stories, learn about the importance of sugarcane cultivation, and maybe even glimpse old Uncle Benny. The unique house and its wealth of documents and furnishings, said Lee, “are a slice of life from that period of history; and although the house gives us all an anchor, the people are more important. And Ardoyne’s restoration and an understanding of its documents help tell this story.”
Details. Details. Details.
Ardoyne Plantation 2678 LA 311 Schriever, La. (985) 804-2271 • ardoyneplantation.com
Guided tours are given Tuesday through Saturday at 9:30 am, 11:30 am, and 2 pm, or by appointment; closed some holidays.
Bus and school groups welcome. Admission: $15 adult; $10 youth; senior, military, and group discounts.
Grounds are available for reunions, picnics, working groups, youth activities, day retreats, bridal and baby showers, weddings, and fundraisers. Portrait sessions may also be reserved.
