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The founder of Oakland was Pierre Emmanuel Prud?homme, a second-generation native of French descent. With his wife Catherine Lambre, he established Bermuda Plantation, as it was originally known, on a land grant on the Red River.  The present main house was completed in 1821. Like many local Creole homes it is raised on brick piers and made of bousillage on lathe between posts. Many of the plantation?s outbuildings also date to the first half of the nineteenth century?among them are two pigeonniers (dovecotes), an overseers? house, a massive roofed log corn crib, a carriage house, a mule barn that was originally a smokehouse, a carpenter?s shop, and cabins.
By the early 1800s, cotton was becoming Bermuda?s main cash crop, the labor of a growing slave community fueling its expansion. The Prud?hommes stayed in the forefront agriculturally, experimenting with crops, equipment, and techniques as much of the antebellum South moved toward a one-crop economy.
 After the Civil War, farming continued under new conditions. Many of Bermuda?s freed workers remained at or near the plantation, at first because the Union commander at Natchitoches ordered them to. In time, though, they worked the fields under Freedman?s Bureau labor contracts, then as sharecroppers or tenant farmers. Some, like Bermuda?s longtime blacksmith Soloman Williams, negotiated separate bargains for higher pay and a different work schedule. A plantation commissary replaced the issuing of rations with a central location to buy supplied on credit against a year?s harvest.
In 1873, two Prud?homme brothers partitioned the plantation, renaming the portion on the right bank Oakland while the portion on the left bank was renamed Atahoe. Both Prud?homme and laborers? descendants occupied and farmed the plantation until late in the twentieth century, continuing a relationship with the site spanning three centuries.
In 1998, Oakland Plantation was acquired by the National Park Service. Today is is open daily for tours.
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