Photo © louviere+vanessa

history

The Southern Live Oak (Quercus virginiana) on Reymond Avenue in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, at approximately 280 years old, predates the American Revolutionary War. The tree is located on land that was once part of the Hundred Oaks Plantation, which was developed by a wealthy Kentucky family around 1820. Sugar cane was the principal crop of the working plantation prior to the Civil War, with cotton being added after the war to further utilize the property. During the first quarter of the 20th century, the 2,800-acre plantation was subdivided into single-family lots and streets that now form some of the Baton Rouge's oldest neighborhoods. In 1945, Lee Rouse engaged young, local architect A. Hays Town to design a contemporary home on the lot on which the Southern Live Oak stands. The house that Town designed is unusual in his extensive body of work. The design exemplifies principles of early modernism that he pursued at the outset of his career before evolving a more vernacular, historically evocative expression that predominates his later projects. Town became the preeminent residential architect of the region, working for over seventy-five years on distinguished houses located in the Deep South.