Louisiana State Museum

Haitian refugees brought numerous cultural elements to Louisiana, including their specific architecture. The square four-room Creole cottage design popularized in New Orleans by Haitian refugees in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is evident in this barracks-type row of eight slave cottages. Like a typical Creole cottage, each of the four rooms had an outside door, a window, and a fireplace that shared a central chimney. These quarters were built on a sugar plantation south of New Orleans and housed at least one hundred or more enslaved men, women, and children. The brick construction and party-wall design were both unusual features; most of the South's plantation slave quarters were separate wood cabins of one to four rooms of rough construction.