Laurel Valley Plantation

Laurel Valley Plantation history 

The story of Laurel Valley begins with Bayou Lafourche.

The name, Lafourche, from the French for “the fork,” alludes to the way the bayou forks from the Mississippi River. Once the main branch of the Mississippi, Bayou Lafourche diverged from the river about 800 years ago. The surrounding area is comprised of hardwood forest, swamp, and marshland.

Named after a type of oak tree commonly found in the area, the laurel oak, and the fact that the property rests between two small ridges above and below it along the bayou, Laurel Valley was recognized by early settlers as an ideal location for agricultural production due to the rich alluvial soil deposits from thousands of years of annual flooding and the natural levies that had built up along its banks.

The Boudreaux years (1785-1832)

Laurel Valley’s first known resident was a French Acadian, known in the south as Cajuns, Etienne Boudreaux. He was one of thousands of petit habitants who made their way to southern Louisiana after being expelled from Nova Scotia. Boudreaux bought a Spanish land grant about two miles south of Thibodaux along Bayou Lafourche in 1785.

Not much is known about the Boudreaux family, but the 1810 census lists 13 people living at the residence, nine males and four females. The Boudreaux family home, built in 1816, is the oldest surviving structure on property. As subsistence farmers, the family grew crops, such as corn and rice, along with cotton and indigo that Mrs. Boudreaux and her daughters would have weaved into blue cottonade clothing. They also likely raised livestock, hunted, trapped, and fished, but produced little more than they needed to survive.

During the 1820’s Bayou Lafourche suddenly became a coveted location for an influx of sugar planters due to its fertile lands and its connection to the Gulf of Mexico on one end and the Mississippi River and New Orleans on the other.

In 1832 the Boudreaux family sold their property, which had grown to about 500 acres, for just $35 to Joseph W. Tucker, a plantation owner from Natchez, Mississippi.

What caused the family to sell the property for such a low cost is unknown. It is possible Etienne Boudreaux’s sons had married and established farms of their own elsewhere. It is also likely that the onerous costs related to maintaining the levees along Bayou Lafourche, which the parish authorities required of the landowners along the waterway, became unsustainable for simple subsistence farmers.

The Tucker years (1832-1865)

J.W. Tucker arrived with slaves, equipment, and supplies to begin transforming the land into an operating sugar plantation. In his time as owner the plantation expanded to encompass nearly 5,000 acres, constructed dozens of buildings including a sugar mill, and his workforce grew to include about 130 slaves.

During those years some 500-600 acres of sugarcane were harvested annually, with nearly the same amount planted with corn to feed the large number of mules, oxen, and horses required to cultivate the land. In 1852, the year of J.W. Tucker’s death, Laurel Valley produced 685 hogsheads of sugar (1,100 lbs each), and 1,458 barrels of molasses.

After his death the operation of the plantation was taken over by his cousin and business partner, Caleb Tucker, who even married his cousin’s widow, Marcelline Emma Gaude, in 1855. He continued to run Laurel Valley until the Civil War.

Following the Confiscation Act of 1862, which permitted confiscation of property owned by anyone "aiding the Confederacy," Laurel Valley lost its loyalty status when Caleb Tucker joined Confederate troops in Vicksburg, where he died in the summer of 1863. Around the same time, the rest of the Tucker family at Laurel Valley fled before the advancing Union Army as it marched through Lafourche Parish.

When they returned after the end of the Civil War they found the northern forces had seized nearly everything of value – more than 1,000 hogsheads of sugar, about 1.15 million pounds, and 1,200 barrels of molasses, along with hundreds of horses, mules, and other cattle. They had also burned the plantation home.

Over the ensuing decade, the plantation changed hands nearly a dozen times, including two of Joseph Tucker’s sons. But they, like the other owners during those tumultuous years following the war, were unable resolve the complications and costs associated with restoring the equipment, machinery, and livestock necessary for farming operations, not to mention the added confusion over a new labor issue the South had never before contended with – contract laborers.

Each of the attempts to restore the plantation to pre-war levels of production ended in foreclosure on outstanding debt.

The Wormald years (1874-1892)

Thibodaux resident Burch Wormald took over the property 1874. He made modifications to increase the efficiency of the mill, attempted to diversify the plantation’s economic base by flooding fields in the back to plant rice for several years, built a portion of the new plantation home, and constructed 26 shotgun style cabins for the workers.

Wormald was the first owner to show a considerable profit following the war. First, he reached some stability with the workforce, with more than 20 families living year-round in the village.

The efforts did lead to Laurel Valley returning to production levels unseen since before the Civil War, but were expensive. Despite the success, his fate was ultimately the same as the other owners following the war, accumulating too much debt through his numerous endeavors.

In 1892 Wormald was forced to turn it over to creditors.

The Lepine years (1893-present)

Frank Barker and J. Wilson Lepine were experienced planters who had for years successfully run another smaller operation at Melodia Plantation just a few miles south of Laurel Valley along Bayou Lafourche.

Under their leadership, and with a more stable workforce and the construction of a new railroad system, Laurel Valley began to thrive again.

They made the mill the focus of the plantation, rather than the fields by increasing the supply of cane to the mill, turning it into a central processing complex during the harvest season, known colloquially as “grinding,” processing not just its own cane, but also cane from Melodia Plantation, from tenant farmers on their own land, as well as cane from other neighboring plantations along Bayou Lafourche. This system was bolstered by the construction of a new railroad system. The railway linked the mill and fields to both Bayou Lafourche, where raw sugar and supplies were shipped on barges to and from New Orleans for sale, and to the other neighboring plantations that provided the Laurel Valley mill with cane to grind.

They also benefitted from a newly stabilized labor force with a new kind of worker – the tenant farmer and sharecropper system. This was an approach that plantation owners across the South had developed as a means of managing the high costs of labor and the difficulty of retaining workers between seasons that were common in the years after slaves were first freed.

In return for providing the tenant or sharecropper with a tract of land to live on and grow cane, the landowner would in return take process and sell the tenant’s share, subtract the costs associated with furnishing the tenant with the necessities for farming, then split what proceeds remained. The system favored the landowner, certainly, but offered tenants some profit and incentive to settle.

During this time, the Laurel Valley Village was a bustling place. In the 1910 census, there were 350 people living there.

However, after decades of industrialization, progress, and profit. Laurel Valley suffered along with the rest of the Louisiana sugar industry when the crop became infected in the 1920’s with mosaic disease, a systemic infection that caused the cane to die prematurely, greatly reducing the weight and quantity of sucrose in the cane.

The Laurel Valley mill shuttered its doors in 1926, never to be reopened, and the creditors that had once again become essential, soon came seeking their share.

Despite the Great Depression which followed, Wilson Lepine, Jr. managed to retain ownership of the farming operation, and eventually paid the plantation free of its debts.

Laurel Valley Plantation remains a sugar cane farm to this day, owned by family members of the Lepines.