Madewood Plantation

A National Historic Landmark and one of the finest examples of Greek Revival architecture in the American South. The 21-room mansion was built between 1846 and 1848 using timber cut and milled on the property - hence the name "Madewood."

Madewood Plantation stands on Bayou Lafourche near Napoleonville, Louisiana, a Greek Revival masterpiece that took eight years to build and claimed the life of the man who dreamed it into existence. Colonel Thomas Pugh, a member of one of Louisiana's most prominent planter families, commissioned the house around 1840, hiring architect Henry Howard in what would become Howard's first major commission. The mansion was constructed entirely from materials produced on the plantation itself. Enslaved workers made the bricks on site, and the interior woodwork was milled from timber harvested from the property. This made wood is believed to have given the house its name. Thomas Pugh enjoyed his completed plantation for only four years before dying of yellow fever at the age of fifty-six, one of the countless victims of the disease that ravaged Louisiana throughout the nineteenth century.

The Pugh family was part of a plantation dynasty. Thomas was the half-brother of William Whitmell Hill Pugh, who owned the Woodlawn plantation, and Alexander Franklin Pugh, who held interests in the Augustin, Bellevue, Boatner, and New Hope plantations. The family's wealth was built on sugarcane and the labor of enslaved people, and the grandeur of Madewood reflected both the profits and the human cost of that system. The house features massive Ionic columns, twenty-five rooms, and a central hallway grand enough to serve as a ballroom. It was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1983 in recognition of its architectural significance.

After decades of changing ownership, Harold Marshall purchased the deteriorating mansion in 1964 and completed a major restoration by 1978. The house later operated as a bed and breakfast, offering candlelit dinners, wine receptions in the library, and overnight stays in period-furnished rooms. In 2016, Beyonce chose Madewood as a filming location for interior scenes of her visual album Lemonade, bringing international attention to the plantation and its layered history of beauty, labor, and loss.

Visitors and overnight guests have reported paranormal activity throughout the property, though the experiences tend toward the subtle rather than the dramatic. The sounds of footsteps in empty hallways, doors that open and close on their own, and the feeling of being watched in certain rooms have been described by multiple guests over the years. Some have reported seeing shadowy figures near the family cemetery on the grounds, and others describe an inexplicable heaviness or sadness that settles over them in particular rooms, especially those associated with the family's history of yellow fever deaths. The spirits of those who built Madewood with their own hands, the enslaved workers who made the bricks and milled the wood, are believed by some visitors to linger on the land, their presence felt most strongly at dusk when the light fades over Bayou Lafourche and the plantation takes on the somber quality that earned it a reputation as one of the most mysterious sites in Louisiana.