06/15/2026
This is the most awesome plantation ever built. Just my option
BELMONT (1881-1891)
Fabulous Belmont! Built by Louis LeBourgeois at a total cost of $100,000.00 it survived the Belmont crevasse of 1888, only to be destroyed by fire a year later.
Adele LeBourgeois Chapin was born on Belmont Plantation 1862. In her book, “Their Trackless Way,” she described her life on the plantation. In this excerpt from her book, she tells of the destruction of Belmont:
‘The beginning of our troubles was the destruction of Belmont by a crevasse, it had been threatened before. The levee had gradually encroached on the front yard and the river was much nearer the house than formerly. Mr. Eades’ jetties for the deepening of the channel at the month of the river had the effect of changing the current and causing the river to overflow its banks in many districts. “The Mississippi is very like a woman”; ‘Will you please be deep?’ She answered, ‘I prefer to be broad’.
“My second brother, Louis, had developed the place and practically paid off the mortgage which was on it after the war. When he came back from Yale University in his junior year, he went to work with a will and resolved to do what he could to save the place. He was only twenty years of age, but he showed and industry and insight of a much older man. It was at his suggestion that rice be planted instead of sugar cane, and he mastered the culture of rice so that he made a great success of the corp. He had a dominant will, and a strong personality- his affections and approval were the pride of my youth. There was in him tenderness towards women of men who feel them to be physically and mentally weaker, but morally and spiritually stronger than men; the attitude of men who shelter and enshrine women. If one has ever known that, no mere camaraderie compensates for the loss of it. My brother could never bear anything petty or small, and I can see him now flutter his hands as Babs does and say “Take away all the little people.””His whole youth had been put into saving and restoring Belmont: it was his great passion: he would sit at dusk and love the place as a man might love a woman.
“The last time I saw it, it was too beautiful for words-so fertile, the house and grounds in such beautiful order. Louis was put on the Levee Board. The water had been very high, and the levee had been watched night and day, till it seemed as if the worst was over and the vigilance was somewhat relaxed. One night at two o’clock Louis was called and told that a crayfish hole was leaking badly, at a dangerous place in the levee. These crayfish bored thorough the levee and the water would leak through and unless stopped it would make a break. He hurried out and arrived just in time to see the river rush though a hole a foot in diameter. The bells were rung at once to call out the Negroes on Belmont and adjoining places, but by the time they arrived there was a break ten feet wide in the levee. The river was a mile wide in front of the house and the current at high water twelve miles an hour. All hands went to work fighting the big Mississippi, and for hours Louis stood waist deep in the water directing and ordering the men; but in vain the Mississippi won.
“When all hope was over and the water was rushing ruthlessly in, he went to the house exhausted and sat in the old dining room with his bottle of whiskey and his two pistols on either side of him, until he was almost carried out, the water already rising in the dining room. All the furniture and books and so forth had been floated out on rafts, except those that they were unable to get out on wagons before the water overtook them. The members of the family were driven ten miles to Uncle Joe’s Plantation. The house did not go down in the flood, but all the drainage on the plantation was destroyed, the gardens ploughed up by the water, and all the beautiful old trees killed. “Willow trees grew all over the place in a year so that it was a dreadful scene of desolation. It seemed hopeless to attempt to restore the place and it was almost a relief when the house burnt down, for we could not bear to desert it. And a least we have the memory of it as a sacred home where no other family ever lived except our own. “In my dreams, I go there still, and hear the mockingbirds sing at dawn. “It was a great sorrow to us all: this and Uncle Joe’s death entirely weaned my father from the South, and he never went there again.
Excerpt from “La Paroisse de St. Jacques…..A History in Words and Photographs” By: Leonce Haydel
