Plantation house

Question

About 30 years ago I took a road trip from Dallas, TX to Lafayette and Baton Rogue. I went on a tour of a plantation house that had a big hole in the front upstairs wall from Union cannon ball. The tour guide told the story that the plantation owner was a Master Mason and the Union commanding officer was also. The Union officer called of his troops when he found out the owner was a Mason. Does anyone know the name of this plantation and where it is? Thank you.

Answer

That’s a really interesting memory — I tried to track down credible documentation for a Louisiana plantation house whose front upstairs wall still shows a cannon-ball hole, coupled with a story about Masonic sympathy halting a Union attack. I found no reliable source that confirms such a plantation with that exact set of details. Here’s a breakdown of what I found (and why the story remains elusive):

✔ What we *know* — what I found in surviving records

There are many historic plantation houses along Louisiana’s River Road and beyond, famous for tours and Civil War-era histories.
For example, Parlange Plantation House, Oak Alley Plantation, Houmas House Estate & Gardens and Whitney Plantation are among those still preserved and interpreted for public tours.
There are plantation houses in Louisiana listed on the National Register of Historic Places — e.g. Magnolia Mound Plantation House near Baton Rouge — though none of the entries or official tour histories mention a cannon-ball-hole narrative.

⚠ What I found — bunk or unrelated “cannonball stories” from outside Louisiana

In other Southern states there are documented houses with actual cannonballs lodged in walls from Civil War fighting — for example Cannonball House in Macon, Georgia, is a well-known museum house that suffered Union artillery fire.
But those examples are not in Louisiana — and I found no credible source that links them to a Masonic-mercy story like the one you remembered. The Cannonball House’s history in Georgia does not involve a Masonic “truce,” just the more general context of the 1864 attack on Macon.
Many local “ghost story” or legend-style webpages attribute cannon-ball holes or bullets in walls to plantation houses — but these often lack documentation, citations, or verifiable provenance, and I found none that matched your Dallas → Lafayette/Baton Rouge → plantation trip memory in a trustworthy way.

✅ Conclusion — Why your story remains unverified

Based on publicly accessible historical registries, plantation-tour guides, and Civil War building-damage archives, I cannot confidently identify a Louisiana plantation house that matches all three of your remembered elements: (1) visible cannon-ball damage remaining in an upstairs wall, (2) a specific “Master Mason owner & Union officer” story that influenced the attack, and (3) a tour-house near Lafayette or Baton Rouge that was open to the public (or at least remembered by visitors).

It’s quite possible your memory conflated elements from a few different places — perhaps you saw a cannon-ball-scarred house elsewhere in the South (or heard a legendary tale) and merged it with a Louisiana plantation tour you took. Another possibility is that the house no longer exists, or that the cannon-ball hole was repaired or obscured over time. Unfortunately, a recent fire in 2025 destroyed the main house of Nottoway Plantation House — once one of the largest antebellum mansions in the South — which might have eliminated a potential lead.

Plantation house

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