A few weeks ago I sneaked in a quick trip to Baton Rouge. I have wanted to stop by this museum and exhibit for several years. When we visit our son at LSU in the Baton Rouge area we usually stay at he Fairfield Inn off of Essen Lane just across the street from the entrance to the Rural Life Museum and grounds.
I only allocated 2.5 hours and would like to have had that much more! I had put my camera bag together prior to making the trip but left it on the kitchen table …… not much use to me that way. The photos were taken with my iPhone….I need to upgrade; I am using the iPhone 3 – several generations “old”.
The museum area has a good number of period buildings and quite a bit of plantation life history in artifacts as well. I had pictured cotton as being the dominant crop but it was grown along with lots of sugarcane. The outbuildings included a facility for boiling the sugarcane juice, several homesteader cabins, plantation kitchen, blacksmith shop, slave quarters, corn cribs and more.
The museum is filled with the details and images of the slave labor used in both the cotton growing and the sugarcane growing. The work must have been hard and the hours long. There is a section of the museum that delivers a “no punches pulled” look at the slave trade.
The Rural Life Museum has several examples of homesteader dwellings and they are simple yet well-built structures. I like the Dog Run style – two separate rooms with a breezeway between them covered by a common roof. Photo below.
I stopped and took a good look at the strawberries being tested by the LSU folks on the property grounds….FYI, several big botanical gardens are also located on the sprawling property. I need to find a source for the beautiful berries I saw growing….I kick myself for not snatching one as no one was around…..couldn’t do it so I left wondering about the taste! It is University of Florida development for winter strawberries that has all of the commercial properties and still retains a very good sweetness.
http://www.visitbatonrouge.com/lsururallifemuseum/
http://appl027.lsu.edu/rlm/rurallifeweb.nsf/index
Very large and early strawberries.
Winter Star strawberries
A cotton patch.
Now those are real mud tires.
An old feed trough hollowed out from a log.
More of the notching og the logs.
The notching to join these logs was intriguing.
Very interesting chimney construction.
Dog Run style building, living on one side and cookhouse kitchen in the other.
Log building and farm implements. Must have been back breaking work.
Homesteader’s house
Where they boiled the cane juice
One of the many old buildings.
Cook House and kitchen garden.
A cloche that obviously was very old. The glass had begun to pick-up that purple tint as it ages.
I really loved hte brick work here. This was on the overseers house.
Blacsmith shop
Frog gigs….too cool!
No need for Crossfit operating this washer!
Now that is an egg carton!
Civil War period plantation wagon
Old horse drawn cutter
From My Backyard 
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