Antebellum

As newlyweds, David and Mary made their first home with William Weeks in the Felicianas.  With William’s death in 1819, they moved to the Attakapas region, to a property on Bayou Parc Perdu, before turning their sights to 158 acres on Bayou Teche at New Iberia. 

Construction of the Shadows-on-the-Teche began in 1831. One of only three brick structures in New Iberia in the 1830s, the house was a unique and beautiful combination of a Classical Revival style exterior with a Louisiana Colonial floorplan on the interior. Sadly, David Weeks would never see the completed house. Only months before Mary and their six children—Frances, William, Alfred, Harriet, Charles, and David, Jr.—moved into the home, David journeyed to Connecticut in hopes of finding a cure for a mysterious illness that plagued him. He died in New Haven on August 25, 1834.    

Until her sons came of age, Mary became a property owner and oversaw the operations at the family sugar plantations and at the Shadows. This also meant that Mary would assume the role of a slave owner in the Antebellum South. Documentation from the Shadows, including “Inventories” of “moveable property” from 1835 and 1846 offers insight into the lives and families of the 164 enslaved men, women, and children who produced the wealth of the Weeks family.  While the majority of the enslaved population resided at the sugar plantations—planting, harvesting, and processing the sugar—24 men, women, and children operated the Shadows, growing and harvesting the food that fed the family and the enslaved population as well as managing the house.

The People of the Shadows

Amos, Patty, and their Children

In 1846, Amos was 46 years old and had recently become a widower when his wife Patty passed away along with two of his young children, Philippe and Henry. Amos, along with the couple’s three surviving children – Milton, Susan, and Caleb – was enslaved at the Shadows. Amos spent his days planting and harvesting foodstuffs and tending to the livestock. According to Mary Weeks’ letters, he was also charged with chopping and distributing wood for the fires that warmed the rooms of the main house and the cabins where he cared for his children with the support and kinship of his community.

Another 1852 letter from Mary also highlights the harsh labor endured by Amos and his children. At the young age of 23, Mary ordered Susan a “buckskin brace to go over the shoulders, and straps to go below” to ease the back pain from which she suffered. The fact that such a young woman required a brace illustrates the well-documented brutal conditions in the sugar-planting economy which had damaging effects on enslaved men and women and resulted in higher mortality rates than in other regions in the South.

Louisa Bryant

In 1835, at the age of 24 (though later records indicate she was 28) Louisa was married to Isaac and was mother to eight children—Caroline, Perry, Nathan, Little Isaac, Riley, Granville, Ann, and an infant baby that had yet to be named. Louisa, Isaac, and their children were enslaved at the Shadows and at the Grand Côte sugar plantation. For much of her life, Louisa worked in the main house of the Shadows, her days occupied with cleaning, cooking, and caring for Mary Weeks and her children. According to personal letters, Mary Weeks appeared to be particularly fond of and trusting of Louisa, making her “general overseer [of the house], attending to sick, & the calves, garden, house, pantry & every thing else” whenever Mary was away.  

Living, working, and likely sleeping close to the Weeks family meant that Louisa had little personal autonomy and limited time to spend with her own family. But as a wife and mother, she had to find time to attend to those roles as well – sewing clothes, caring for her children, doing laundry, and cooking. Letters from Mary Weeks also bring to bear the especially brutal realities of motherhood for enslaved women in southern Louisiana where the harsh climate and harsh labor brought illness and death all too often and all too early in one’s life. Her son Perry died in 1838 while records show that she and her other children faced life-threatening illnesses.