Magnolia Plantation, Louisiana Route 119, Natchitoches, Natchitoches Parish, LA

1988 Charles E. Peterson Prize, Honorable Mention
Significance: Lands within Magnolia Plantation have been owned and cultivated by the same family since the French land grants of 1753. Magnolia remains one of the South's most complete plantation complexes, with buildings and landscape features spanning its entire 250-year history. Noteworthy are the oak alley, a nationally significant cotton press, the brick slave quarters later used for tenant housing, a slave hospital, a blacksmith shop, the plantation store, and the big house with private chapel.
Planter Matthew Hertzog built the plantation's "big house" in the 1890s on the foundation of a dwelling burned during the Civil War. The previous house was a regionally distinctive, raised Creole cottage dating to the 1840s, up to 1851; it had a two-story brick basement, raised galleries on the front and back, and ringed by over twenty 18' brick Tuscan columns. The present big house is a late nineteenth-century interpretation of the raised Creole cottage traditionally built in the Cane River area, adapted to modern materials, technologies, and tastes.
As one of the largest plantation homes in the area, Magnolia's big house reflects the wealth, status, and endurance of the Hertzog family at the end of one of the most turbulent periods in Louisiana history. The house tells much about the history of planter society, agriculture, and the rural South since the colonial era.

Unprocessed Field note material exists for this structure: FN-105
Unprocessed Field note material exists for this structure: N795
Unprocessed Field note material exists for this structure: N921
Survey number: HABS LA-1193
Building/structure dates: ca. 1840 Initial Construction
Building/structure dates: 1864 Demolished
Building/structure dates: 1898 Subsequent Work
National Register of Historic Places NRIS Number: 79001071