Reconstruction & After

This photograph of African American workers outside the sugar mill on Grand Côte was taken in the 1870s after Emancipation. These men or their ancestors were likely enslaved on the Weeks plantations. Shadows-on-the-Teche Archive

At the end of the Civil War, William Frederick Weeks returned to the Shadows to join his wife and daughters at the family home. In many ways, the war had profoundly changed the lives of those who lived at the Shadows and Grand Côte—the institution of slavery was abolished with the passage of the 13th Amendment in December 1865, and production of the region’s main cash crop, sugar, was dramatically reduced as the number of operating Louisiana sugar plantations decreased from 1,200 in 1861 to 175 in 1864.

Following the Civil War, many of the free men and women once enslaved at the Weeks plantations continuing to operate sugar production as wage laborers. In 1865, only weeks after the passage of the 13th Amendment, Louisiana—along with many other Southern states—passed “Black Codes” that were intended to reinstitute much of the structures of the former slave economy. While these laws ensured some civil rights like the right to marry and own property, they broadly curtailed freedom by mandating that all freed men and women of adult age enter into a labor contract to work on the farms, plantations, and in the households of former slave-owners. Those contracts overwhelmingly benefited plantation owners, like William F. Weeks who established agreements that would trap many men and women in harsh and dangerous working conditions, cycles of debt to the employer, and low wages as their labor not only revived the Weeks-owned sugar plantation, but also supported the Shadows estate. 

William F. Weeks and his family continued to live at the Shadows in the years after the Civil War ended—residing at Grand Côte during the grinding season. His daughters, Lily and Harriet (Pattie, as she was affectionately known), would continue to reside at the Shadows—Lily intermittently—into the 20th century.  

Upon her death in 1918, Lily’s son, William Weeks Hall, purchased his Aunt Pattie’s half of the Shadows, launching a 40-year-long project to revive the house and its grounds.