They stood like two giant sentries jutting up out of the fog, massive brick chimneys as tall as the surrounding trees. It was 2011, and I had come early in the morning to shoot landscape photographs of the oak alley at Fontainebleau State Park near Mandeville. The chimneys and some adjacent crumbling walls were all that was left of Bernard de Marigny’s old sugar mill from the 1830s, interpretive signs explained to me.
This connection to the founder of Faubourg Marigny made me smile, since “Marigny” was the name my wife and I had given our oldest child. I made a note of the structure but moved on to the trees, creating some images that are still some of my favorites.
Flash forward to today. I am now an FAA-registered drone pilot here at NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune. I found myself wondering recently about Marigny, his sugar mill and Fontainebleau, thinking there might be a story and some cool drone footage to be shot. As it turns out, there was all that and more, once I scratched the surface of the story of this complicated and important figure in the history of both sides of Lake Pontchartrain.
1 / 21LOUISIANA STATE MUSEUMFontainebleau and Bernard de MarignyPortrait of Bernard de Marigny de Mandeville, about 1810-15. Courtesy Louisiana State Museum.
2 / 21Photo by Andrew Boyd, NOLA.com | The Times-PicayuneFontainebleau and Bernard de MarignyThe sugar mill ruin at Fontainebleau State Park near Mandeville, La. The Fontainebleau plantation belonged to Bernard de Marigny de Mandeville. He had St. Tammany’s first industrial park with the sugar mill, a saw mill, brick kiln and more.
3 / 21 Fontainebleau and Bernard de MarignyThis graphic shows the rough boundaries of the Marigny plantation just south and east of New Orleans proper in 1798. 
4 / 21Photo by Ted Jackson, NOLA.com | The Times-PicayuneFontainebleau and Bernard de MarignyThe Pitot House on Bayou St. John is an example of Creole colonial architecture and similar in design to the Marigny plantation house, demolished long ago.
5 / 21 Fontainebleau and Bernard de MarignyBernard de Marigny had the brilliant idea to take his plantation and subdivide it into residential lots beginning in 1809. This resulted in the first suburb of New Orleans, the Faubourg Marigny. 
6 / 21Photo by Andrew Boyd, NOLA.com | The Times-PicayuneFontainebleau and Bernard de MarignyBernard de Marigny began buying land around Bayou Castine on the shores of Lake Pontchartrain in the late 1820’s.
7 / 21Photo by Andrew Boyd, NOLA.com | The Times-PicayuneFontainebleau and Bernard de MarignyThis is a photo in the Fontainebleau State Park Visitors Center of a painting believed to be of the main house on the Fontainebleau plantation. 
8 / 21Photo by Andrew Boyd, NOLA.com | The Times-PicayuneFontainebleau and Bernard de MarignyBernard de Marigny’s house at Fontainebleau was located near these oak trees, well west of the main oak alley on the property.
9 / 21Photo by Andrew Boyd, NOLA.com | The Times-PicayuneFontainebleau and Bernard de MarignyThe main oak alley at Fontainebleau was not for the owner’s home, which was a modest dwelling to the west that is believed to have been there when Bernard de Marigny purchased the property in 1829. The cabins for the approximately 100 enslaved people living and working on Fontainebleau were grouped around and under these oaks. 
10 / 21Photo by Andrew Boyd, NOLA.com | The Times-PicayuneFontainebleau and Bernard de MarignyThe main oak alley at Fontainebleau was not for the owner’s home, which was a modest dwelling to the west that is believed to have been there when Bernard de Marigny purchased the property in 1829. The cabins for the approximately 100 enslaved people living and working on Fontainebleau were grouped around and under these oaks.
11 / 21Photo by Andrew Boyd, NOLA.com | The Times-PicayuneFontainebleau and Bernard de MarignyThe sugar mill ruin at Fontainebleau State Park near Mandeville, La. The Fontainebleau plantation belonged to Bernard de Marigny de Mandeville. 
12 / 21Photo by Andrew Boyd, NOLA.com | The Times-PicayuneFontainebleau and Bernard de MarignyThe sugar mill ruin at Fontainebleau State Park near Mandeville, La. The Fontainebleau plantation belonged to Bernard de Marigny de Mandeville.
13 / 21Photo by Andrew Boyd, NOLA.com | The Times-PicayuneFontainebleau and Bernard de MarignyThe main oak alley at Fontainebleau State Park.. 
14 / 21Photo by Andrew Boyd, NOLA.com | The Times-PicayuneFontainebleau and Bernard de MarignyVines climb up one of the huge old chimneys in the sugar mill ruin at Fontainebleau State Park.
15 / 21Photo by Andrew Boyd, NOLA.com | The Times-PicayuneFontainebleau and Bernard de MarignyThe sugar mill ruin at Fontainebleau State Park near Mandeville, La. The Fontainebleau plantation belonged to Bernard de Marigny de Mandeville. 
16 / 21Photo by Andrew Boyd, NOLA.com | The Times-PicayuneFontainebleau and Bernard de MarignyThe sugar mill ruin at Fontainebleau State Park near Mandeville, La. The Fontainebleau plantation belonged to Bernard de Marigny de Mandeville.
17 / 21Photo by Andrew Boyd, NOLA.com | The Times-PicayuneFontainebleau and Bernard de MarignyThe sugar mill ruin at Fontainebleau State Park near Mandeville, La. The Fontainebleau plantation belonged to Bernard de Marigny de Mandeville. 
18 / 21Photo by Andrew Boyd, NOLA.com | The Times-PicayuneFontainebleau and Bernard de MarignyThe main oak alley at Fontainebleau State Park..
19 / 21Photo by Andrew Boyd, NOLA.com | The Times-PicayuneFontainebleau and Bernard de MarignyThe main oak alley at Fontainebleau State Park.. 
20 / 21Photo by Andrew Boyd, NOLA.com | The Times-PicayuneFontainebleau and Bernard de MarignyThe shoreline at Pontchartrain State Park near Mandeville, La. Bernard de Marigny bought up all of the shoreline from Fontainebleau State Park to what is now Lewisburg, just west of the Causeway Blvd. with an eye towards real estate development. 
21 / 21Photo by Andrew Boyd, NOLA.com | The Times-PicayuneFontainebleau and Bernard de MarignyBernard de Marigny’s real estate venture that became the resort town of Mandeville was an immediate success, bringing in about $80,000 in the first three days of sales. That’s over 2 million dollars in today’s money._____________
Bernard de Marigny de Mandeville was born in 1785 in New Orleans, the great-grandson of one of the city’s founders. His forebears had all been French military officers, and at the time of his birth, the family was wealthy. The main Marigny plantation was just outside the gates of the French Quarter, south of the city on the Mississippi River. When his father died in 1800, young Bernard, the only son, was the sole heir.
At that time, New Orleans’ growth was exploding as the region became a magnet for all sorts of business ventures. Marigny had the vision to realize his own business opportunity, subdividing much of his plantation into residential lots in 1809. He offered 15-year financing at 8 percent, according to local Marigny expert Robin Leckbee Perkins, the St. Tammany Parish records management director in the Clerk of Courts office in Covington. Marigny’s real estate speculation was an immediate hit. New Orleans was bursting at the seams and needed more places for people to live.
The sugar mill ruin at Fontainebleau State Park near Mandeville, La. The Fontainebleau plantation belonged to Bernard de Marigny de Mandeville. He had St. Tammany’s first industrial park with the sugar mill, a saw mill, brick kiln and more.
Fast forward to the late 1820s and we find Marigny starting to buy parcels of land on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain just west of Bayou Castine. He was planning to build a resort town on the undeveloped land at the lakefront, knowing it would appeal to those with enough wealth to enjoy escaping New Orleans’ summer diseases and heat. The resort town of Mandeville would have to wait until Marigny made another purchase first, though.
In June of 1829, he bought the Bonnabel plantation across the bayou from his other holdings. It was by far his largest purchase, at well over 4,000 acres, and came with cattle, a corn mill, a rustic residence and six enslaved people. He renamed the plantation Fontainebleau because he said it reminded him of the French king’s beautiful forests outside of Paris. Over the next 20-plus years he built a brick kiln, sugar mill, blacksmith’s shop, saw mill and an infirmary on the property. A canal was dug to connect his industrial buildings to the lake, allowing transport back and forth to New Orleans. About 100 enslaved men, women and children lived and worked on the property. Perkins calls it St. Tammany’s first industrial park.
One of the things I was surprised to learn when speaking with Robin Perkins was that the gorgeous oak alley I had photographed did not, as I had assumed, lead from the lake to Marigny’s planation home. Instead it shaded a collection of slave cabins. Marigny’s house was farther to the west, under some other oaks. Perkins believes it remained the modest house that he inherited from the Bonnabels when he bought the property.
One of the popular legends about Marigny is that he was nothing but a gambler and wastrel and frittered his fortune away. While it’s true he liked to gamble and party, it wasn’t gambling that did him in. The national Panic of 1837, a financial crisis in the United States, hit Marigny hard. Although he held on for 15 years, he was forced to sell Fontainebleau in 1852 to settle his debts.
Today, all that’s easy to see from those days is the ruin of the sugar mill. (When the Civilian Conservation Corps came into the area in the 1920s to help establish what came to be Tchefuncte State Park, they bulldozed all the other remaining structures.) The location of the brick kiln is known, and if you wander through the underbrush there you quickly stumble upon hundreds of ancient, moss-covered brick fragments. The remnants of the work canal are also still there, off in the underbrush to the east of the oak alley.
The location of Marigny’s house is known. Richard Scott, who runs the Visitors Center at Fontainebleau, says he likes to wander around that area after storms have brought floodwater. The last time that happened he found one of the home’s old flagstones washed up.
So much of the plantation’s structures are still there, amongst the picnic tables and swingsets and visiting Winnebagos, but they take a trained eye to see.
[FOOTNOTE: Marigny’s nose for real estate was again rewarded when he created the town of Mandeville. After acquiring the land west of Fontainebleau over a period of 2 1/2 years, he surveyed and prepared for sale residential lots. He then advertised the upcoming auctions and even chartered steamboats to bring prospective buyers across from New Orleans. It was an instant success. During the first three-day auction, he sold 388 lots for about $80,000 worth of property. That’s about $2.16 million today.]
Original article found at: https://www.nola.com/living/index.ssf/2018/02/bernard_de_marigny_no-good_gam.html