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BELLE GROVE |
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The misty memory of
a beautiful lady haunts me – a beautiful lady that I never knew.
My first introduction to her was in 1969 when I saw her picture
in a book, “Ghosts along the Mississippi.” Her beauty was not
created from flesh and bone, but brick, mortar, and lime. For
you see, my beautiful lady was a house – Belle Grove.
 Belle
Grove was built in 1857 by John Andrews. Located near White
Castle, Louisiana, she was the largest plantation home ever
built. Her architect, Henry Howard, also designed Nottaway,
another, still extant, Louisiana plantation home. Belle Grove
was a vast house that stood on a twelve-foot, arched foundation.
The shafts of her soaring Corinthian columns were thirty feet
high, the column’s carved capitals the height of a six-foot man.
Her interior was spacious, and filled with carved-marble
mantels, highly-polished hardwood floors, and richly-detailed
molding and pilasters.
However, Mr. Andrews
did not enjoy Belle Grove’s beauty and pleasures for long. He
lost his fortune during the Civil War, and Belle Grove, built to
last the Andrews family for generations to come, was sold to
Henry Ware in 1867. Over the years that followed, the Ware
family – rich, powerful, and extravagant – filled Belle Grove
with exquisite antiques, rich tapestries, Dresden china, and
gilded paintings, most of which they had purchased in Europe.
 During
the reign of the Wares, Belle Grove glistened with life. Her
lavish dinner parties, sumptuous balls, and private race tracts
were the talk of the state. Yet all this grandeur was
dependant on the simple stalks of sugar cane that grew in
undulating vastness on the vast plantation that surrounded Belle
Grove. When the sugar cane crop went “bust” three years in a
row, so did the Ware’s fortune, and that lost fortune led to
Belle Grove’s demise. In 1924, the Wares closed up Belle Grove,
moved to New Orleans, and seldom returned to visit their grand
house, which set so regally under its cathedral of majestic
oaks.
 And
so Belle Grove sat, and thus began her tragic downward spiral
into oblivion. For more than twenty-five years she languished,
abandoned, and mostly forgotten. Her rooms, which had once
bubbled with life, were now silent – a creeping lush mantel of
greenish-brown mold covering her fading beauty. Time, neglect,
and the onslaught of southern summers took it’s vengeance, as
did the vandals who are credited with setting her on fire. By
the morning of March 16, 1952, Belle Grove was a smoldering
ruin. A subdivision now sits atop her grave.
 I’ve
often wondered who was the last person to leave Belle Grove? Was
it a member of the Ware family, who walked down her long
sculpted hallway, locked her front door, and never returned? Or
was it a faithful servant who had walked down that same hallway
for years, answering that same front door that he would now lock
one last time?
And what of the
ensuing silence in that vast, empty house? Did it prance up and
down the hallways, staircases, and out onto the pillared
porticoes? Did it twist itself around the soaring Corinthian
columns like ivy? Or was it like itself and the house it
infested – silent and forlorn?
Here’s hoping that
somewhere there is a box in someone’s dusty attic full of old
photographs of the beautiful lady who haunts my memory. And
here’s hoping this article will resurrect a few. For more
information on Belle Grove, please visit
www.bellegrove.net.
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