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About
Between 1818 and 1851, Auvignac Dorville, a Louisiana Creole, managed the day-to-day operations of the Gentilly plantation, located a few miles from New Orleans along Bayou St. John. The plantation belonged to Henri and Marguerite de Sainte-Gême, who entrusted their property to Dorville's careful supervision when they left Louisiana for the Sainte-Gême ancestral home in France. Dorville wrote to the Sainte-Gêmes for more than thirty years, offering detailed glimpses of the plantation's crops, financial situation, environmental challenges, and events surrounding the two dozen enslaved men, women, and children working there. Expertly translated and annotated by Nathalie Dessens and Virginia Meacham Gould, Dorville's letters illuminate nineteenth-century life on an urban plantation that connected the rural world of Louisiana to the urban sphere of New Orleans and reached far into the Atlantic world.
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Reviews
"The Gentilly plantation, though one of New Orleans's oldest, was never grand. It kept the town in beer, stocked it with fowl and firewood, supplied oranges to the locals. It was still at it in 1850, when John McDonogh purchased the property. But as the fifty-four, carefully annotated letters reproduced here show, the plantation was also a small window onto a larger reality. The correspondence b
Lawrence Powell, author of The Accidental City: Improvising New Orleans