Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Spring 2006 - (Page 32) LOUISIANA ASSOCIATION OF MUSEUMS For more information about Louisiana’s museum community, telephone, fax, or write: Louisiana Association of Museums, P.O. Box 4434, Baton Rouge, LA 70821-4434 (225) 383-6800; www.louisianamuseums.org Frogmore Plantation merges history with modern agriculture S ome hours of the day may be confusing for Buddy and Lynette Tanner, owners of Frogmore Plantation. One moment they are in today’s world operating their 1,800-acre cotton farm and hightech Tanner Gin. Then a call from Melissa Powell, tour manager at the historic plantation store, tells them visitors are approaching down the road. The Tanners hop in their SUV, stop and pick up Dorothy, an employee, and then drive the short distance to their home where all three make a Frogmore Plantation is a modern cotton farming operation, but it also harkens back through history. Tours compare and contrast a working cotton plantation from the 1790s to present day. Visitors are told about slave culture, sharecropping, and modern technology. 32 LOUISIANA ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES\Spring 2006 quick costume switch, to reappear in the 1850s. Dorothy Smith, whose ancestors worked Frogmore for generations, is the same age as Lynette and has been a long-time friend and lifetime resident at Frogmore. The Tanners and Smith greet bus loads of tourists as part of the tour of the Tanners’ 200-year-old plantation, replete with slave quarters, a steam cotton gin, plantation church, overseer’s home, antique farm equipment, general store and even a threehole privy. Frogmore Plantation, on U.S. Highway 84 just west of Ferriday, is on the National Register of Historic Places and was the recipient of Louisiana’s state tourism award in 1999. According to the owners’ extensive research, it is the only such offering of realistic history of the evolution of the South’s cotton industry, from the antebellum era of slave ownership to cotton’s preCivil War boom, sharecropping, and later mechanization and computerization of the industry. To refer to Lynette Tanner as a history http://www.louisianamuseums.org
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