Nottoway Plantation House, White Castle Louisiana

Date added: March 23, 2023

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Nottoway is nationally significant in the area of architecture. Partially this is owing to its size. With 64 rooms, seven interior staircases, and five galleries, it is certainly one of the largest extant antebellum plantation houses in the South.

In addition, plantation houses were a building type which was dominated largely by Greek Revival architecture. Nottoway is unusual, being an essentially Italianate plantation house. Its quality in this respect can be seen in the striking asymmetrical composition, monumental galleries, Renaissance Revival details, and fine carved interior woodwork.

Nottoway was built in 1858 by John Hampden Randolph, whose father Judge Peter Randolph had come south from Virginia around 1820. John Hampden Randolph began acquiring land in the area of the house site in 1841. By 1860 he owned 155 slaves and 6,200 acres, Of which 1,200 were under cultivation. He and his wife Emily Jane Liddell had twelve children.

When Randolph was ready to build his house, he went to New Orleans and asked various architects to submit designs. He chose Henry Howard's plan for a 64-room mansion. The Randolphs held onto the house through the Civil War and Reconstruction.

In 1889, following the death of her husband, Mrs. Randolph sold the mansion at auction for $100,000. Nottoway then passed through the hands of several owners until 1911, when it was bought by Dr. Whyte Glendower Owen.

Building Description

Nottoway plantation house is set approximately 200 feet behind the Mississippi River levee, two miles north of the town of White Castle. Originally there was a grove of 21 oaks between the house and the river, but this was lost when the present levee was constructed in the 1940's. The house is presently encompassed by a somewhat diminished grove of oaks, magnolias, pecan trees, and sweet olives.

The mansion consists of 64 rooms and seven interior staircases with a main five-bay block, a large rear service wing, and a bedroom side wing. The grandest Spaces are in the main block on the second floor, where the 12 by 40 foot central hall is flanked by the ballroom on one side and the library stair hall and dining room on the other. The "L"-shaped ballroom measures 30 feet by 40 feet. It is bisected by an elaborate tripart arch motif. Half the room is widened to form a great curving bay, a feature probably unique in antebellum plantation architecture of Louisiana. The main stair hall is recessed behind a broad elliptical arch.

The house has a total of five galleries, of which the most impressive are the front gallery and the ballroom side gallery. These consist of colossal order pillars with exaggerated modillion capitols. The side gallery follows the curve of the ballroom bay, giving the effect of an elegant halfround portico.

The two main stories, which are of frame construction, rest upon a one-story brick base, which is faced in rusticated stucco. The main story is reached by means of a double curving staircase of granite blocks. The design of the cast iron balustrades appears in many other Henry Howard designed buildings of the period.

Aside from its vastness the interior is most noteworthy for its carved cypress and molded plaster ornamentation. The main hall has a sumptuous cornice with modillions interspersed with patera and an elaborate stairhall archway flanked by consoles and cartouche panels. The ballroom has a brincaded frieze and free-standing fluted Corinthian columns in the arcade. The Rococo Revival marble mantels are pure white in the ballroom, pure black in the dining room and library, and gray in the bedrooms.