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Ambroise Lecomte and his wife, Julia Buard, established Magnolia Plantation in 1830. Lecomte had been acquiring land throughout the 1820s and 1830s, while at the same time shifting from food crops and small tobacco exports to large-scale cotton production. By 1860, the Lecomtes' were the largest slaveholding family in Natchitoches Parish. The enslaved laborers held by the Lecomtes had cleared 2,240 of the Lecomte’s total of 5,395 acres and were producing huge cotton crops. One of three plantations the family owned, Magnolia, was the home site. The original plantation house there was built in 1850.
 Most
of Magnolia’s structures date between 1835 and 1850. The main house lies outside
the park’s boundary. It is an 1897 reconstruction of the original, which was
burned by retreating Union troops during the Civil War. The park’s buildings
include a blacksmith shop, a plantation store, a former slave hospital that
at various times also housed the owners (while the main house was being rebuilt)
and the overseer, eight brick cabins, and a gin barn. The blacksmith shop, workspace
of enslaved workers, first Daniel and then Charles, would typically have been
one of the structures in place to provide the developing plantation with wheels,
tools, and nails.
Magnolia’s eight duplex-style quarters are the remnants of a rare masonry
slave village. The cabins were initially built in the 1840s to house two slave
families each. In the twentieth century, the two rooms were linked to form single-family
tenant housing and furnished with electricity.
 In
the aftermath of the Civil War, fraternal organizations and freemen’s churches
helped hold the community together. One African Methodist Episcopal Church,
Saint James, stood on Magnolia itself until the 1960s, performing burials just
across the river at St. Andrew’s Baptist Church. The influence of the plantation
itself continued to be significant, and not just as an employer. Baseball diamonds
and bush racetracks at Magnolia and other area plantations were common ground
for local groups, as was the plantation store.
Magnolia’s huge gin barn houses a gin and a rare wooden screw cotton press. The 11 by 30-foot cotton press still stands in its original location and was used until the late 19th century, when the plantation converted to steam.
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