Oak Alley Plantation

Where it sits. Oak Alley stands on the west bank of the Mississippi at Vacherie, in St. James Parish, Louisiana, about sixty miles upriver from New Orleans along the Great River Road. The river here runs inside a levee that is higher than the surrounding land, so the approach from the water side means climbing the levee and then looking down onto the property. That is the view the place was designed for. From the levee crest, a corridor of twenty-eight live oaks runs 800 feet in two rows of fourteen, dead straight, framing the white columned house at the far end like a picture in a tunnel.

The story behind it. The oaks came first and nobody knows who planted them. They were already substantial when the first recorded French settler built a modest house here, and dendrological estimates put them in the early eighteenth century, roughly a hundred years older than the mansion. The Greek Revival house was built between 1837 and 1839 for Jacques Telesphore Roman, a sugar planter and brother of a Louisiana governor, with his father-in-law Gilbert Joseph Pilie generally credited with the design. It is a two-storey brick structure, plastered and painted, wrapped on all four sides by a colonnade of twenty-eight Doric columns — one for each oak, a symmetry that is almost certainly deliberate. The Romans named it Bon Sejour; the rivermen who saw the trees from their decks called it Oak Alley, and that name won. Sugar built and then broke the estate, which passed through several owners after the Civil War and was badly decayed by the 1920s. Andrew and Josephine Stewart bought it in 1925 and restored it with the New Orleans architect Richard Koch. Josephine Stewart established the Oak Alley Foundation in 1966 and left the property to it; the house opened to the public in 1976, and Oak Alley is a National Historic Landmark.

The people who worked it. The estate ran on the labour of enslaved people — the foundation's research has identified names and biographical fragments for around 220 individuals held here — and since 2013 the site has presented that history in a dedicated exhibit of reconstructed cabins along the eastern edge of the grounds, with documents, inventories and recovered names. One of them changed American agriculture: an enslaved gardener recorded only as Antoine successfully grafted a superior pecan in 1846, producing the first named commercial pecan variety and the ancestor of the modern industry. That fact is now foregrounded on the tour rather than buried in a footnote.

On screen. The alley of oaks is one of the most photographed approaches in the American South and has been used repeatedly by productions wanting an instantly legible antebellum Louisiana.

• Band of Angels (1957), with Clark Gable and Yvonne De Carlo, filmed here
• Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles (1994), directed by Neil Jordan from Anne Rice's novel, used Oak Alley as Pointe du Lac, the plantation of Brad Pitt's Louis — the burning-fields sequence and the oak corridor are unmistakable
• Hush (1998), with Jessica Lange and Gwyneth Paltrow, used the house as the fictional Kilronan
• Beyonce's Deja Vu video (2006) was shot in the alley and on the grounds

The distinction worth keeping straight is that Oak Alley is a real, intact 1830s house filmed as itself, unlike many Louisiana plantation locations that supply only exteriors.

What you actually see today. A ticket covers a guided tour of the main house, self-guided access to the slavery exhibit, a Civil War tent display, a blacksmith shop, the sugarcane theatre and the whole of the grounds. The house tour climbs to the second-floor gallery, from which the alley reads best; the interiors are furnished to the 1840s with period pieces rather than original Roman family contents. Outside there are formal gardens, a pond, an 1830s overseer's building and a restaurant serving Cajun and Creole cooking. Overnight guests can stay in cottages on the grounds, which buys access to the alley at dawn and at dusk when the day visitors have gone — the only way to photograph it empty.

Getting there and timing. Oak Alley is a little over an hour's drive from New Orleans by way of Interstate 10 and the Gramercy or Sunshine bridges, or a longer, better drive along Louisiana Highway 18 past a string of other River Road properties including Laura and Whitney. Coach tours from New Orleans run daily. October through April brings tolerable temperatures; the summer is severe, and afternoon thunderstorms are routine from June onward. Camellias flower in winter and the oaks are evergreen, so there is no dead season for the view. Grounds are largely flat and firm, but the house's main floor is reached by an exterior staircase and the second-floor gallery is stairs only.