William Weeks Hall Era

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.

The People of the Shadows

­Bunk Johnson 

Bunk Johnson is likely the most famous person to have spent some of his life at the Shadows. Born in New Orleans in December 1880 (though the date is disputed), Johnson is regarded as a pioneer of New Orleans Jazz—playing trumpet alongside legends like Jelly Roll Morton and Louis Armstrong. In 1920, Johnson moved to New Iberia and soon after began working at the Shadows. As William Weeks Hall recalled, “he came to me in his early 30s, as a yardman. His own terms…Shortly after all this, Bunk had to leave, he was given a position to teach music in some of the schools here.” Having lost his two front teeth, however, playing the trumpet became a challenge, and Johnson continued seasonal work at the Shadows maintaining the estate grounds. By the late 1930s, outfitted with a new set of teeth, Johnson once again went on tour as a Jazz musician, but returned home to New Iberia where he died on July 7, 1949.

John Clement Knatt 

On March 16, 1919, John Clement Knatt was born only a few miles from New Iberia in Olivier, Louisiana. Knatt met William Weeks Hall through his estate caretaker Theophile Viltz—whose wife worked alongside Knatt as an agricultural laborer. In a 2012 interview, Knatt explained that he “went with Mr. Viltz to help him in the yard at the Shadows as often as I could. That is how I got to know Mr. Hall. Since both of my parents had died, Mr. Hall became almost like a father to me.” As a teen, Knatt went to work in New Orleans for Harriet Torian Weeks, but returned to the Shadows to work for Weeks Hall in 1946 until he retired in 1984. He lived at the Shadows until 1961, taking care of the house and looking after an aging Weeks Hall. When the first floor opened to visitors, Knatt gave all of the public tours. As Weeks Hall wrote in his bequest of the house to the National Trust, “the protection of the property has been in the hands of Clement Knatt and I desire him to be given direction under Mr. Jefferson to protect this place and the contents, which are very valuable. He has attended me most loyally in my afflictions. Since my blindness, Clement Knatt has had to attend to all of these things. He is the only one in the entire world who knows the disposition and place of every item in this house…”  

Clement Knatt died in 2019 at the age of 99, two weeks before his 100th birthday.