Lucie Monk Carter
“Laurel Hill is such a sweet place,” said Nell Figge on a recent visit to the West Feliciana house. “It’s a very worthy structure.”
David Floyd, director of the LSU Rural Life Museum in Baton Rouge, agrees. “It’s a unique site,” he said. “A yeoman farmer’s house, not a plantation house.”
The Haygood/Figge (pronounced “Figgy”) family, whose ancestors built the house in the early 1800s, is donating it to the museum, along with three acres of land, a barn, a shed, and a 1980s freestanding addition. The family is also donating funds for the operation and maintenance of Laurel Hill.
The house is small—one room deep, two rooms wide, and two stories tall. It was built of enormous hand-hewn blue-poplar logs with bousillage infill of mud, clay, and moss. “The logs were hand cut by two men with an adze,” said Figge.
Lucie Monk Carter
In the community of Laurel Hill in West Feliciana Parish, fronting on old Highway 61 a half mile from the Louisiana/Mississippi border, the house is situated within a clearing surrounded by a forest of mixed native hardwoods.
It was built by William Lemon on part of a five-hundred-arpent Spanish land grant issued in 1797 by Gov. Manuel Gayoso de Lemos. Lemon had left County Antrim for America, settling in what are now Adams County, Mississippi, and West Feliciana Parish, Louisiana.
William (whom the family calls William Senior) sent for his family in Ireland, writing to his son, William Junior, in 1822, “In 1817 I got tired of farming and bought a comfortable house and some land . . . a convenient distance from Natchez.”
William Senior described a “dwelling house, kitchen, stable [and] garden [that] lies immediately on a. . . public road adjoining a never failing spring of excellent water and rising value. In short I think it every way calculated for your accommodation. It lies just fifteen miles from St. Francisville on the Mississippi. If you can make it with your family here I will make you a complement of the place.”
William Senior sent his son funds to travel from Ireland to Louisiana. William Junior and his family, along with close friends, came to Louisiana and established themselves at Laurel Hill in the house William Senior had described.
Figge is a descendant of the Lemon family that built the house and has occupied it on and off for a couple of centuries. She and her cousins spent summers with the grandparents down the road at a house called Hazelwood.
She admits she is a bit vague on details of her family history, but she tells snippets of family stories. “This was a modest acreage, four or five hundred acres,” she said. “During the Civil War, local farmers were burning their crops to keep them out of the hands of the Yankees. William Lemon refused to burn his crops. He was conscripted against his will into the Confederate army and died in a Union prison camp.”
At some point the house was occupied by spinster sisters Margaret Ann Argue (1868-1948) and Jane Walsh Argue (1870-1946). Around 1890, they built an addition by extending the boards of the front porch and adding a room for their brother Charles, the Laurel Hill postmaster who was also a conductor for the West Feliciana railroad that ran between St. Francisville and Woodville.
“The train picked up cotton from the plantations and took it to Bayou Sara,” said Figge.
Lucie Monk Carter
During the day, while Charles Argue was at work, his sisters taught school in the addition. “The Misses Argue ran a school here for local children, supervised by the West Feliciana superintendent of schools,” said Figge. “My grandmother, Nell Lemon, for whom I am named, had to be brought in as a tiny little girl to make up a quota. I have her graduation certificate. The other students were hulking farm boys.” (That little girl would later graduate with the first class at LSU to include women.)
Nearby are St. John’s Episcopal Church, built in 1873, and the Lemon/Jackson Cemetery, which dates to 1849 and is still used as a family cemetery. “Vincent Jackson built the church and started the cemetery,” said Figge. “He could see his daughter’s grave from his pew in the church.”
Walking through the cemetery, she points out the stones of family members with names such as Lemon, Argue, Jackson, Germany, and Babers, noting that several were born in County Antrim, Ireland.
Figge said her cousin Paul Meriwether Haygood did extensive research into the family genealogy. He died in 2015 and is buried in the cemetery. “We’re not sure where his research is,” said Figge. “It’s probably on his computer.”
“Laurel Hill is such a sweet place... It’s a very worthy structure.”
Probably in the 1940s, the house passed out of the Haygood/Figge family and was ultimately purchased by Ellen Bryan Moore, who was then register of the State Land Office.
Moore’s daughter Vicki Spurlock has fond memories of the house and grounds that her family first used as a camp, riding horses and fishing in a pond built by her father Haywood Moore.
Vicki married Gary Spurlock at St. John’s Episcopal Church. In the 1980s, the Spurlocks moved into the Laurel Hill house, remaining for seventeen years and raising four children there. They added a separate structure with a kitchen and den.
“It was a great house to raise kids,” said Spurlock, whose children decided the spotty electrical system was the ghost of “Uncle Charlie” Argue.
“You’d be lying in bed and the TV would go off and the lights would blink,” said Spurlock. “The ceiling fan would come on for no reason. We said it was Uncle Charlie’s ghost.”
Lucie Monk Carter
Spurlock, a Baton Rouge realtor, said she got a propitious phone call just as she was getting “tired of fighting an old house and making the commute.
“Paul Haygood called and said ‘We want to buy the house back.’ I loved having it go back to people who loved it and appreciated it. “
“We bought it back in order to preserve the house and the church,” said Figge. “We just didn’t want civilization here.”
The family used an existing limited-liability corporation to make the donation. LSU accepted Laurel Hill on behalf of the Rural Life Museum, to be preserved and used as a classroom, research laboratory, and historic-house museum.
The facility will be used by university students in the departments of history, rural sociology, anthropology, geography, architecture, interior design, landscape design, and forestry. The property will also be a laboratory and classroom for the new Doctorate of Design in Cultural Preservation program.
As a research facility, Laurel Hill will offer students an opportunity to obtain hands-on experience within their fields of study. Based on research by students and faculty, the house will be restored and its history interpreted.
“The acquisition of Laurel Hill is a great opportunity for LSU to expand its mission and the mission of the Rural Life Museum,” said Floyd. “Very few universities have the opportunity to own and use a two-hundred-year-old structure and site for research, study, and educational programming.”
The museum is a center for the collection, preservation, and interpretation of material culture, cultural landscapes, and the vernacular architecture of Louisiana and the Lower Mississippi River Valley. It focuses on the folkways of the working classes of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Louisiana.
[You might also like our look at the colorful history (and present) of Madewood Plantation.]
According to Floyd, “Laurel Hill will offer tourists a different introduction to life in Louisiana and the South from the plantation elegance so many envision when they hear the words ‘Old South.’”
Floyd said the site will help the RLM present a more historically accurate and nuanced view of colonial and nineteenth-century plantation-era life.
“This is kind of new and exciting for Louisiana,” he said. “It’s not just students, it’s deans, former deans, professors.
“The whole idea is to give LSU students hands-on experience in architecture, architectural research, documenting the building, historic landscape surveying, archival research. When it’s done, it will be open to the public as a resource.”
Ruth Laney can be reached at ruthlaney@cox.net.
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