Oakland Plantation: Cultural Landscape Report, Cane River Creole National Historical Park, National Park Service

Suzanne Turner Associates

This Cultural Landscape Report documents the historical development and existing conditions of the landscape at Oakland in order to evaluate its historical significance and integrity and to provide direction for treatment and use. This report builds upon an earlier CLR Part 1 written by Ian Firth and Suzanne Turner in 2002, which focused on the history of settlement and antebellum agriculture at Bermuda Plantation, the precursor to Oakland, prior to 1865. Treatment Recommendations focus on landscape preservation for Oakland Plantation. This includes recommendations for short- and long-term management, as well as guidance on future landscape planning initiatives that consider the balance that must be achieved between management constraints and the desired visitor experience. America’s current social and cultural climate highlights the need to explicitly address the impacts of systemic racism and historical inequities within the disciplines of public history and historic preservation, to broaden both the range of stories that are told, and the methods that are used to tell those stories. This is another factor that informs treatment recommendations for Oakland’s cultural landscape. Traditionally, landscapes of enslavement, which are integral to understanding American history, its present and future, have been undervalued. As a result, many of these landscapes have been lost to development or, especially in rural areas, erased over time and forgotten, only to be misrepresented, misunderstood, or romanticized as purely bucolic settings or repurposed as “back of the house” narratives. Recommendations in this CLR envision ways in which CARI might proactively evolve the management and interpretation of Oakland to reveal to the visitor the foundational aspects of slavery and later, sharecropping and tenancy farming on the evolution of its cultural landscape. Oakland’s cultural landscape also faces environmental threats, including changing river dynamics, impacts from more frequent and intense weather events, pests, and other factors that contribute to processes of landscape deterioration. In response, treatment recommendations seek to enhance the visitor’s understanding of the important historic connections between Cane River Lake and Oakland’s cultural landscape, to minimize further environmental deterioration, and to aid in protecting the unit’s character-defining landscape features. Collectively, the treatment recommendations seek to preserve extant layers of historic landscape resources and, to the degree possible, to recapture the landscape’s historic character through site-wide interventions that support landscape interpretation. Overall considerations include consistency in treating related CARI units and applying existing treatment guidance, cultural landscape treatment goals and objectives, ongoing and planned park projects, and proactively contributing to racial justice and climate resiliency. These considerations form the basis for determining the most appropriate treatment approach for Oakland Plantation’s cultural landscape.

Oakland Plantation: Cultural Landscape Report, Cane River Creole National Historical Park, National Park Service

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