Baton Rouge

Monday, September 3, 2012

Headed toward Louisiana again.  Stopped at the Visitor’s Center at St. Francisville which is a cute little historic town.  Drove to a couple of plantations but one was closed and the other we decided not to go in.  Drove around the town and had lunch at Magnolia Café where we had a wonderful grilled shrimp Po Boy sandwich. We called our folks from Baton Rouge as the New Orleans club members could not take us due to the hurricane.  We stayed with Harold and Jean in their home.  They do major travel about 3 times a year.  They recently did a Danube River cruise with Vantage Travel from Bucharest to Amsterdam.  They are very interesting people with hobbies of bonsai and genealogy.  They started researching the Merrill name and now have all families of Merrill’s in the USA in research in their computer room.  Apparently Harold’s family goes back to the 1600’s in this country.  Before we came to their house we visited the State Capitol which is not a dome but looks a bit like the Empire State Building.  It is the tallest Capitol building in the USA and was built in the Depression while Huey Long was governor.  He had to add a portion to the design so it would be taller than Nebraska’s capitol building!  We learned about Huey Long and that he was assassinated in that building.  There is still mystery shrouded in this assassination.  He was loved and hated, did a lot of good for the state but was almost a dictator.

State Capitol - Baton Rouge Louisiana

Huey Long and his supposed assassin

View from top of the Capitol building

 We then went to the Rural Life Museum which

is run by LSU.  It is a museum of agricultural and rural life in Louisiana from the past.  They brought in many outbuildings of slave quarters, shotgun houses, Acadian houses, showed how they made syrup out of sugar cane, cotton displays, and 2 barns full of artifacts including farm equipment, old washing machines, commodes, hearses, buggies, weaving.

Crops of Louisiana include cotton, sugar cane, rice, crawfish 

Loved the chicken coops

You know what this is

Hearse