Now through December 11, more than 20 examples of Louisiana-made furniture from the 18th and early 19th centuries are on display at The Historic New Orleans Collection’s Williams Research Center, 410 Chartres Street in the French Quarter. The pieces are on loan from Magnolia Mound Plantation in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.  
Today Magnolia Mound is surrounded by an urban setting, but the plantation was once the center of a 900-acre sugar and cotton operation with frontage on the Mississippi River. The main house was built ca. 1791 as a small settler’s house. In the early 1800s, Armand Allard Duplantier, a prominent planter who had served in the American Revolution as General Lafayette’s aide-de-camp, enlarged and renovated the original structure. Currently, the 16-acre site is operated as a museum by the Baton Rouge Recreation and Parks Commission.
While the facility is closed for improvements, furniture from Magnolia Mound will be available to audiences in the New Orleans area. Examples on display include elegant armoires, Campeche chairs, children’s furniture, and a rare writing table. Accompanying the furniture are several photographs of furnished rooms at Magnolia Mound by Steve Gross and Sue Daley from their publication Creole Houses: Traditional Homes of Old Louisiana (Abrams, 2007), illustrating how the structure and its contents are usually displayed.
The exhibition is free and open to the public and is presented in anticipation of The Collection’s forthcoming book Furnishing Louisiana: Creole and Acadian Furniture, 1735–1835 (Winter 2010).