Darby House

About this property

The Massé/Darby House is a plantation house fronting on Highway 182 in Baldwin, St. Mary Parish, Louisiana. It was originally part of a large sugar plantation. The builder and precise date of construction of the house, called Darby House on the National Register of Historic Places, is presently unverified. An undocumented newspaper article in possession of the current owner of the house dates the Darby House to 1782 and names the builder as Andre Massé, according to " . . . records of the present owner, Mr. D.L. Johnson . . . ". Another article from the Eunice News by Marie Johnson, 5 October 1976, gives a building date of 1764-1776. These two articles, although discrepant, are especially noteworthy in that the Johnson family owned or resided in the Massé/Darby House from 1938 until 1981, and apparently possessed documentation now lost or unavailable to present day researchers. An article in the New Orleans Times-Picayune, 4 July 1976, by the Louisiana Tourist Commission, dates the house (again without citation) to 1765; and the late Emery Hebert, who owned Darby House from 2001 to 2014, in an undated handout follows suit, citing the 1765 date but incongruously naming the builder as Alfred Hennnen, who was born in 1786. In 1969 the House was purchased by the St. Mary Bank, which, in 1981, commissioned Leonard L. Battaglia to research the property transfers for the house. Battaglia traced the land upon which the house stands to an original Spanish land grant to Andre Massé, but his report contains no mention of the house itself until 1814, when Dr. James Hennen sold the land "where vendor [i.e. James Hennen] now resides" to his son Alfred Hennen. This brief statement has led several writers, among them the reporter for the National Register of Historic Places, to credit James Hennen as the builder of the house with a building date of 1815. There are no known records that substantiate either the attribution to Hennen or the date of 1815. The history of "Darby House" in Baldwin, Louisiana, has suffered from confusion or misreading of others sorts. Much confusion has arisen from the existence of another house known by the same name and of similar period and style—no longer standing but still remembered—in nearby New Iberia. Yet further confusion is with Alice plantation, modeled on and thus post-dating the Massé/Darby house, that once stood in Baldwin but was moved in 1961 to Jeanerette. Alice has also been variously dated: a bronze plaque at roadside gives a building date of 1790, while other sources date the house to 1803. But even this latter date would place the Massé/Darby House earlier than James Hennen's ownership, which dates to 1809.

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.

More in St. Mary County

Historic places, battles, and census history across St. Mary County.

More historic places in Louisiana

Browse all historic places in Louisiana.

Conflict records

Explore 19,000+ military engagements across American history.

Louisiana history

Colonial settlement, territorial period, and statehood narrative.