Three landmarks, three versions of the same economy. Kent Plantation House, completed in 1800 on Spanish land-grant soil, is the oldest standing structure in central Louisiana — its raised-cottage form built for heat and flooding, its six surviving outbuildings including a slave cabin and a detached kitchen that still runs open-hearth demonstrations the first Saturday of each month. Six miles south of Alexandria, Inglewood — also known in the record as Hard Times Plantation — holds a 1836 Creole main house, twenty-two support structures, and the same infrastructure of forced labor. The Edwin Epps house, originally on Bayou Boeuf, is where Solomon Northup spent ten of his twelve years enslaved, and where a Canadian carpenter named Samuel Bass finally got word north. Northup published his memoir in 1853. The house now sits on the LSUA campus, free to visit, the truth having become, as the record puts it, foundational.
