Wade Hampton II remained as an important advisory capacity to his family regarding the Houmas. Located between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, The Houmas House Estate allows visitors to experience the life on a sugarcane plantation in the 1800’s. By the time Dr. George Crozat acquired the house in 1940, it had badly deteriorated. It has been generally accepted that the two-story, four-room brick house now attached to the rear of the main house was constructed by Donaldson and Scott, and that John Smith Preston and Caroline Hampton Preston (Wade Hampton’s daughter) built the big house when they moved to the plantation in 1840. John Burnside and Oliver Beirne, Andrew Beirne’s son, were the same age and matured together in Mr. Beirne’s business, becoming very close friends, a friendship that lasted through the years.

H oumas House, on the east bank of the Mississippi River near Burnside, Louisiana, is recognized as an important regional variation on the Greek Revival style that was used by many grand plantation homes in Louisiana and elsewhere in the South. At the age of 71, John Burnside, feeling ill, traveled to White Sulpher Springs, West Virginia for what he hoped would be a restful recovery.

The Houmas Estate had a frontage of thirty-five acres front on the Mississippi River, comprising the Donaldson, Clark and Conway tracts, and contained over twelve thousand acres of the finest quality of cultivable land, and a work force of over five hundred and fifty slaves, and was without exception, the finest property possessed by a single proprietor in America.John Burnside was born in Tyrone County, Ireland around 1810 of a poor family.

In 1860 he was recorded as owning 753 slaves who lived in 192 cabins, although Joseph Menn, in his study of Louisiana’s large slaveholders, believes this was the total number of slaves on Burnside’s four holdings in Ascension Parish. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.Sternberg, Mary Ann. With architect Douglass Freret, Crozat restored the main house to its 1840s appearance and demolished two rooms connecting it to the older section, replacing them with a breezeway with an arch at each end. Numerous out buildings, located just behind the main house, were demolished. In April of 1848, there were thirty family members and guests in residence at the Houmas, and just as many servants in the household.

In the 1920s, a failed sugar crop forced the family to sell off the plantation piece by piece. Before he acquired the plantation in 1889, Miles had represented South Carolina in Congress and served as mayor of Charleston. They included an old kitchen, a pair of pigeonnieres, five large Moorish water cisterns, a school house, stables, green houses, service quarters and dozens of small service buildings. By 1862 Burnside was the nation’s foremost sugar producer, turning out 5,150 hogsheads of sugar (approximately five million pounds).

Along with his properties on the Mississippi, Burnside also purchased the largest estate in the City of New Orleans, then known as the Robb Mansion.

The great colonnade has not changed since 1829, when General Hampton set out to build a mansion fitting for his wife, Mary Cantey Hampton.General Wade Hampton I died in 1835, leaving an estate valued at $1,641.065 dollars.

Mr. Burnside left one of the largest estates in America to his boyhood friend, Oliver Beirne.Oliver Beirne, 70 years old when he inherited the bulk of John Burnside’s estate, quickly took up residence at Houmas and began sharing his time managing Houmas Plantations, Burnside Place, and his own estate at Old Sweet Springs. In 1892, the children transferred all their interests to the Miles Planting Company and William P. Miles was appointed President.It was during the 1890’s that the Miles Family enlarged the mansion by connecting the 1829 mansion to the French House, to the rear. The lavish dinner tables were dressed with fish, shell fish and oysters from the Gulf, wild turkey, venison, duck from the swamp, and woodcock, snipe and birds shot by Preston and his guests in the fields.