This text was obtained via automated optical character recognition.
It has not been edited and may therefore contain several errors.

---

The Origins of the Creole Raised Plantation House
By JONATHAN FR1CKER
Division of Historic Preservation State of Louisiana
The Creole raised plantation house is among the best-known symbols of Louisiana’s cultural heritage. Yet its origins are widely misinterpreted. Creole, or French colonial, architecture takes its place along with British and Spanish colonial as one of North America’s three great colonial architectural traditions. But of these three it seems that the French is the least understood and the least written about. For example, over the years the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians has published numerous papers on British colonial architecture. To date, however, it has published only a few times on the subject of Louisiana’s Creole architecture.'
This overall paucity of scholarship has undoubtedly contributed to popular misunderstanding of the Creole style. After all, if there is no solidly established academic point of view on a particular his* torical phenomenon, it gives a much freer rein to the mythmakers. Such has been the case with attempts to understand Creole architecture.
The Creole raised plantation house is a regionally distinctive form of architecture that persisted in southern Louisiana for almost two centuries. It appeared early in the colonial period, and one can still find vestiges of the style as late as 1880. Like most colonial styles of architecture, the Creole raised plantation house does not represent an exact model, but rather a variable collection of particular features. Seldom are two examples precisely alike, but most share the' following characteristics:1
1 Sec, for example, Buford Pickens, “Regional Aspects of Early Louisiana Architecture," Jounuil of the Society of Arcbijetturai Historians, VII (1948), 33-36.
! This list of characteristics is a product of my experiences during five years of field inspection! in Lauisiana.