History of Oakland Plantation

The founder of Oakland Plantation was Pierre Emmanuel Prud'homme, a second-generation native of French descent. With his wife Catherine Lambre he established Bermuda, as it was originally known, on a land grant on the main channel of the Red River, known as Rivière aux Cannes.

By the early 1800s, cotton was becoming Bermuda`s main cash crop, the labor of a growing slave community fueling its expansion. The Prudhommes stayed in the forefront agriculturally, experimenting with crops, equipment, and techniques as most of the antebellum South moved toward a one-crop economy. When Union General Nathaniel Banks` Red River Campaign swept through the Cane River area in the spring of 1864, Bermuda was spared the worst of its ravages. A steam cotton gin was burned, possibly by Union soldiers, as were almost 400 bales of cotton, probably by Confederate troops; but the main plantation house and other outbuildings survived.

In the aftermath of the Civil War, farming went on under new conditions. A great many of Bermuda`s freed workers remained at or near the plantation. Initially, they stayed because the Union commander at Natchitoches ordered them to. In time, though, they worked the fields under Freedmen`s Bureau labor contracts, then many as sharecroppers or tenant farmers. Some, like Bermuda`s longtime blacksmith Solomon Williams, negotiated separate bargains for higher pay and a different work schedule. A plantation commissary replaced the issuing of rations with a central location to buy supplies on credit against a year`s wages.

In 1873 two Prud'homme brothers partitioned the plantation, renaming the portion on the west bank Oakland. Both Prud'homme and laborers` descendants occupied and farmed the plantation until late in the twentieth century, continuing a relationship with the site spanning three centuries.