All the big houses

Breakfast downstairs was from a side-board buffet of ham, grits, biscuits and fruit.  It was good food and there was plenty of it.  

Monmouth has a some original “out-back” buildings, including a couple of slave quarters and what we thought might be a summer kitchen.

Monmouth was where we leaned that these great houses normally had both a Ladies Parlor and a Gentleman’s Parlor, because Ladies shouldn’t be around the Gentlemen who were smoking cigars and talking politics.  Probably the Ladies didn’t want to, anyway.  The Ladies' parlors were full of pretty colors, flower arrangements and musical instruments.  The Gentlemen's parlors were more somber but somehow more luxurious, testifying to who was paying for all this.  The Gentlemen's parlor at Monmouth was not as dark as my photo looks, but the lighting did not allow for better photography.

Afterwards we toured “Stanton Hall”, which is palatial and lovely, but our guide was new and not very coherent.  Stanton Hall is really luxurious.  The house is huge and the grounds cover a full town block.  

The house boasts a large front hall, which most houses don't have, and all the rooms were richly furnished.  But no photography allowed inside.

We heard about how the great mirrors, which were up to 10 feet tall, would be covered when there was a death in the family.  This was so the person’s spirit wouldn’t get caught in the mirror.  In one of the houses a mirror has a couple of smeared patches on it that almost look like hand-prints; the story is that someone forgot to cover the mirror after a death, so these are the handprints of the deceased, trapped inside the mirror forever.  Doesn’t say much about the smarts of the deceased . . . 

Somewhere along the line, in one of the tours, we learned that during this period they often painted porch ceilings a light blue color.  The story was that wasps would think that blue color was the sky and not try to build nests there.  We decided that when we finish the porch at home, we’ll paint it blue; our area has a lot of wasps, and it's is worth a try! 

We admired the grass that many houses used as trim; it grows to about 6 inches tall, fills an area well, and does not need to be trimmed.  We asked around until someone told us it was called Monkey Grass.  We are going to try to grow this at home, in the space between the sidewalk and the road, where nothing wants to grow.

The last house in the area we wanted to see was Longwood.  It's out of town a little ways so we drove out to it.  It's a beautiful shell of a very original house.  

The octagon-sided house is completely finished on the outside, but only marginally finished on the inside.  The Civil War interrupted construction - some tools are supposedly still sitting in the dust where workmen put them down when they left to join the army - and the owner ran out of money.  It’s still amazing building.

They did get the dining room done to a usable state.  It is not very ornate but it wasn't meant to be the final version; this was a case of "It will do until the real dining room is finished".  Over the long dining room table hangs a large piece of carved, polished wood, with an attached rope that runs across the ceiling and down a wall.  This was their ceiling fan.  Someone (probably a slave) would gently pull the rope like a bell-rope, which would make the wood panel move back and forth, hopefully stirring up a slight breeze during dinner.

By then we'd seen most of what we could fit in on this trip so we got back in the car and drove to New Orleans, where we checked into the Best Western Patio.  This is the first hotel I’ve been at that has a safe in the room.  It didn’t make me feel safe - just the opposite.

We went to the French Quarter and walked around to see the sights.  Then we walked to Jackson Square, where we decided not to take the cooking class we had been considering, because it turned out to be just a demonstration.  We went back to Bourbon street as it was getting dark.  Bourbon is full of strip joints and noise, so we left there and went back to Jackson Square area, where we had beignets and cafe a lait at Cafe du Monde.  This is a great tradition in town.