A partnership, between a LaPlace property owner and a jazz biographer, is planning to open one of the oldest structures in St. John the Baptist parish to the public for the first time.
Known most commonly as the Woodland Plantation, the house and surrounding grounds figure in two noteworthy moments in American history:
-The 1811 rebellion of enslaved people which commenced there. It was the largest in the nation’s history.
-The dawn of jazz as the birthplace of Edward “Kid” Ory, an early jazz band leader, composer trombonist and recording artist, who first made music at his home along the dirt road that runs still through the plantation’s quarters.
The partners are Timothy P. Sheehan, a New Orleans geologist originally from Ocean Springs, MS who bought the property in 2017 and John McCusker, a longtime photojournalist at the Times-Picayune and New Orleans Advocate whose biography of Ory, “Creole Trombone: Kid Ory and the Early Years of Jazz” was published by the University Press of Mississippi in 2012.