Ardoyne Plantation House

About this property

Ardoyne Plantation House is located on Highway 311 in Schriever, Louisiana, just northwest of Houma, Louisiana. It was built 1894 and added to the National Register of Historic Places on November 1, 1982. Louisiana State Senator, and third generation sugar cane farmer, John Dalton Shaffer was looking for a home for his wife, Julia Richardson Cutliff Shaffer. Mrs. Shaffer requested that her husband build her a little cottage that overlooked Bayou Black. In 1888, he purchased approximately one thousand acres of land in Schriever, Louisiana. He then commissioned New Orleans–based architect, John Williams of Williams and Brothers to design and build the main residence on a twenty-acre tract. The location of the house on the property lead, in part, to the name. “Ardoyne” in Scottish means “little hill or knoll” which was the high point of the property, and the name of a Scottish castle. The construction of the main residence began in 1890 and was completed in 1894. Local immigrants of German, Italian and African descent contributed the labor to build the residence and later would comprise a good portion of the labor force that would work the remaining land. These same immigrant workers harvested the cypress and pine trees from the land that was then sent to a mill in St. Louis, Missouri to become the construction lumber for the house. Ardoyne Plantation is set in a cluster of live oak trees overlooking Bayou Black. This two-story home stands starkly different than the other homes of this era. Looking at the front, the Gothic Revival architecture design adds elements that capture the attention. There is a seventy-five-foot tower at the left, as seen from the front, and two high gables. The tower is “iced” with fine mill work, commonly referred to as “gingerbread”. This “gingerbread” is continued around the top of the gables. The steep roof line accentuates the tower and gables. The walk through window in the tower contrasts with the bay widow of the left gable. The right gable, much narrower and equally as steep, barely frames the window it protects. The entrance porch is supported by square wooden columns, bannisters and high, walk-in windows. The double entrance door is directly below the center gable of the house, but just a little off-centered to the right side. The boldness of the second story tower, gables and windows overshadow the simple entrance doorway. The woodwork for the house, which was milled from the trees from the property, is present in every room of the house. Floors, walls, ceilings and molding are all native wood. There is a seventy-foot-long hallway that leads to a curving cypress stairwell that leads to the second floor. The plantation office is located on the first floor of the tower and the inlaid wood ceiling mirrors the shape of the octagon structure of the tower. Each room is spacious and lit by chandeliers of crystal and brass. The side porch, which has an Eden-like view of the garden is screened in. In the south, this is commonly called a “mosquito porch”. There was a “coach porch”, which is a porch that was tall enough that a horse driven coach could pass through, that was destroyed by Hurricane Betsy in 1965 and never rebuilt.

Location

Categories

Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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