William Weeks Hall Era

A car accident proved to be a pivotal moment in William Weeks Hall’s life. Photograph Possessed by the Past by Clarence John Laughlin, c. 1939. Shadows-on-the-Teche Archive

Born in 1894 in New Orleans, William Weeks Hall grew up visiting the Shadows but spent his formative years in the Big Easy. A promising artist, he attended the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia from 1913-1918. By this time, his family’s 300-acre Shadows estate in New Iberia had gradually shrunk to 2 ½ acres while a bustling town developed around it. Weeks Hall returned home in 1919, paying his aunt Harriet $10,000 to assume control of her half of the estate. After a 2-year art scholarship trip in Europe from 1920-1922, William Weeks Hall returned to the Shadows, making it his permanent home until his death in 1958. 

William Weeks Hall was both a prominent member of the New Iberia community but also, in many ways, an outsider. Throughout his four decades at the Shadows, Hall opened its doors to a host of artists and celebrities—including Walt Disney, Cecile B. DeMille, Henry Miller, Elia Kazan, Tex Ritter—whose names are inscribed on a door in his art studio.  To ensure his privacy and that of his guests, Weeks Hall planted a border of bamboo that separated the house from the Main Street outside. 

Weeks Hall viewed the Shadows as far more than a family heirloom—for him, it was a record of the past that he was responsible for preserving. Over the course of his life, he dedicated himself to restoring the house and preparing it to be a public space. To accomplish this decades-long project, Weeks hired gardeners, craftsmen, and laborers from the New Iberia community, most of whom were African American. Perhaps the crowning achievement was the renovation and artistic reinvigoration of the surrounding gardens—integrating statues, pathways, and plants into the existing landscape first established by his great-grandmother, Mary Weeks.  And yet, at the same time, this 20th-century garden rid the estate of the original slave quarters, working yard, carriage house, and stables, making a once functional, historic landscape into an ornamental one.