Gentilly

A New Orleans Plantation in the French Atlantic World, 1818–1851

Nathalie Dessens, Virginia Meacham Gould

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9780807184554
• Edition: 0
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: French History
• Index: History

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
• PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• The Gentilly Plantation: A History
• The Correspondence of Auvignac Dorville, 1818–1851
• Epilogue
• 1. Auvignac Dorville’s Letter of July 18, 1822 [in French]
• 2. Detailed Account Sent by Auvignac Dorville to Henri de Sainte-Gême, 1818–1819
• 3. Louis Leufroy Dreux’s Last Will and Testament, 1813
• 4. Inventory of the Estate of the Late Louis Leufroy Dreux, 1814
• 5. Mandate Given to Auvignac Dorville for the Sale of the Gentilly Plantation
• 6. Act of Sale of the Gentilly Plantation to John McDonogh
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX