Sugar built the Teche the way it built everything it touched — completely, and on the backs of people who never held the deed. David Weeks raised his house on the bayou in 1834; by the start of the Civil War, more than 200 enslaved people worked his land. The attic held what most plantations buried: 17,000 documents naming 1,112 people across the Weeks family holdings. Down the bayou in Jeanerette, the museum on Main Street tells what the plantation tour skips — the grinding machinery, the mill workers, the industrial weight of Louisiana's most important crop. Franklin carries the ledger in its streetscape: more than 420 antebellum homes still standing along a corridor of live oaks that were saplings when the money was made. The wealth is visible. The archive makes visible who made it.
