Exploring the Houmas House Plantation & New Orleans history

World Footprints returns to Louisiana’s River Road—where beauty, contradiction, and memory sit side by side—to explore one of the region’s most storied estates, revisit a largely hidden chapter in American history, and get an insider’s take on today’s New Orleans.

Houmas House: A Living Museum on the River Road

Our journey begins at Houmas House in Darrow, Louisiana, a restored antebellum estate that once commanded vast sugarcane wealth. Today, its colonnaded façade and manicured gardens mask complex layers of history. Houmas House is the sister property to The Greenbrier Resort in West Virginia, and under the direction of owner and entrepreneur Kevin Kelly, the property has been reimagined as a living decorative arts museum.

Kelly—whose personality is as bold as the home’s architecture—has spent years curating art, antiques, and archival materials to tell a fuller story of the plantation era. We spent the day with him walking through rooms filled with portraits, period furniture, and artifacts that reflect both grandeur and contradiction. The result is less a frozen-in-time plantation house and more an evolving narrative about the people who shaped the region.

The 1811 Slave Revolt: A Story America Tried to Forget

Next, we travel upriver to a site where history unfolded in a very different way. In 1811, just outside New Orleans, enslaved people launched what would become the largest slave uprising in U.S. history. Though its scale was shocking—hundreds of enslaved men marching toward the city with the aim of dismantling the system that imprisoned them—the story remained largely buried for more than two centuries.

Author Daniel Rasmussen joins us to discuss American Uprising: The Untold Story of America’s Largest Slave Revolt. Rasmussen draws a direct line between this rebellion and the broader struggle for human freedom, revealing how the uprising exposed the contradictions at the heart of the young American republic. His work repositions the revolt not as a footnote, but as a central moment of resistance that shaped the trajectory of American slavery.

New Orleans From the Inside: Laura Martone’s Guide to the City Behind the Curtain

Finally, we turn to New Orleans, a city that refuses to be simplified. Travel writer and native New Orleanian Laura Martone, author of the Moon Travel Guide to New Orleans, stops by to share the city she knows—the places locals return to again and again, the dishes worth crossing town for, and the rhythms that keep the city’s creative pulse alive.

Martone’s perspective goes beyond must-sees; she offers a local’s sense of neighborhood nuance, seasonal shifts, and the cultural expressions that make New Orleans feel both intimate and endlessly surprising.

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