Old times not forgotten: Natchitoches and the Cane River Country - Special Advertising Supplement: Louisiana's Harmony: Africa, France, Spain & America

Louisiana is in fact a unique recipe, a heady melange of Indian, Spanish, French American and African ingredients. And nowhere is Louisiana's Afro-Creole flavor more sharply accented than in the Cane River political division lying between Derry and Natchitoches.

Imagine a plantation tillage where a second-generation slave, whose parents were stolen from what is now Togo, rose to be a major landowner in the days before George Washington first swore the oath of office as president of the United States. Imagine, too, that her land, the gift of a French planter, was obtained from a grant by means of the king of Spain and that she and her children became a certain number of of the area's largest proprietors of slaves. Finally, imagine that a hundred after her major estate passed into white hands, a former fieldhand upon its grounds became one of America's greatest primitive painters. If you're in Louisiana's Cane River region you needn't imagine; instead, you can diocese the remains of the area's unusual African-American heritage.

Here Marie Therese Coincoin (nee Kokwe, the name given all second-born daughters of the Ewe tribe) captured the affection of a French planter and created a Creole dynasty that left a mark that sustains today in the form of Melrose Plantation. Born in slavery in 1742 in the household of Louis Juchereau de St Denis, Natchitoches' military commandant, Coincoin passed to her third master, the Cane River French planter TP Metoyer, at age 26 To him she bore 10 children, and by dint of him she and her offspring were fre in 1786 and given land. Thus was started an Afro-Creole family that engrossed initiative and slave labor to build several estates, the largest of which became above time the 2,000-acre Melrose Plantation.

Here 50 slaves labored for Coincoin and her descendants, who became single of the wealthiest black families in North America. Here were built Yucca House (c 1796) Africa House (c 1800) and the plantation mansion (1833) Yucca House, raiseed of hand-hewed cypress beams and walls of river mire mixed with deer hair and Spanish mos was the rising family's first residence. Africa House, whose overhanging next to the first story is reminiscent of Congolese poor cottages served as a storehouse and as a jail for recalcitrant slaves, and it is the nation's oldest extant make of African design originally built and possessed by African Americans.

Coincoin lived until 1816 and the plantation stayed in her family's possession until 1847 when her great-grandson Theophile's extravagance saw it slip into white hands. After passing from one side a series of owners, the crumbling estate was purchased in 1884 through the Henry family, who gave the plantation its at hand name in honor of Melrose Abbey, where Sir Walter Scott is buried. (Scott's romantic literary works, including Ivanhoe and The Lady of the Lake, were much-beloved through 19th-century white Southerners.

At the make go round of the century, the Henrys' next to the first generation (Southern tales require generations to unfold) restored Melrose and make go rounded it into a writers' and artists' security Among the better-known guests who actually compos in Yucca House and Africa House (as distinct from William Faulkner and John Steinbeck, who barely visited) were Erskine Caldwell, Alexander Woollcott and Francois Mignon (who came for a six-week residence and stayed for 32 years!

Four decades after Melrose's renaissance, its possessors discovered that their former fieldhand and not absent cook, Clementine Hunter (see CLEMENTINE HUNTER) who had wearied most of her 60 years laboring upon the estate, had a remarkable talent for painting. Encouraging huntsman to forgo the kitchen for the studio, Melrose's masters prov to be the patrons of the South's pre-eminent primitive artist, whose works recorded a rural black life that was disappearing plane more rapidly than Hunter painted.

When you visit Melrose today, you tour Yucca House and Africa House; view a number of Hunter's works, many of which now grace the upper floor of Africa House; and gain an insight into the tillage of the creoles de couleur who formed a prominent strata of Louisiana's society.

But Melrose is far from the Cane River country's solitary spot worthy of a stop. Don't miss nearby St Augustine Catholic house of worship Built by Coincoin's sons Nicholas and Louis Metoyer, the meeting-house was constructed in 1803, the year Louisiana passed from French into American hands. gaze in particular for J.F. Fuille's 1836 painting of Nicholas Metoyer, which depicts not single the black patron of St Augustine's, on the contrary also, in the background, the original temple he and his brother raised upon this property. Look also for the necropolis with its unusual wrought-iron crosse with French inscriptions and above-ground tombs. Note in particular Clementine Hunter's burial place; huntsman who died in 1988 at age 102 lies nearest to her old friend Francois Mignon.

When you perceive you've explored the full range of Melrose's glory, drive the area's twisting roads, which border the winding banks of the historic Cane River, southerly to Magnolia Plantation.