Delta Sugar. Louisiana's Vanishing Plantation Landscape

Cloth $45.00 Reviewed by John Michael Vlach, professor of American studies and anthropology at The George Washington University-and author or editor of nine books on various aspects of folk art, vernacular architecture, and African American material culture, including Back of the Big House: The Architecture of Plantation Savery, from the University of North Carolina Press, 1993. Engaging in what might be termed an exercise in aboveground archaeology, he developed formal typologies for sugar plantations that allowed him to distinguish between French and Anglo-American estates. The land at Ashland plantation proved to be more valuable as the site for a housing development for oil workers who flooded into the area during a boom in the Louisiana petroleum industry in the 198os; however, with the rise of the ability, of opec to control the price of crude oil and the decline of Louisiana-based drilling, only three of the homes planned for “Ashland North” were ever built.