History
This building replaced the first Governor's Mansion, which was a rather large, though modest, frame house constructed for Nathan King Knox, a Baton Rouge businessman, and was the official residence of Louisiana's Governors from 1887 until 1929, when it was razed and the present Old Governor's Mansion was built. The building cost almost $150,000 to complete, and, at a cost of $22,000 (a princely sum for depression-era Louisiana), the Mansion was furnished with the finest damask and velvet drapes, crystal chandeliers, hand-printed French wallpaper, and other fine appointments.
In 1963, a new Mansion was constructed just east of the towering State Capitol building, and in 1964 the old Mansion became the home of the Louisiana Arts and Science Center Museum. The Mansion served as headquarters for the LASC until 1976, when the Museum moved to new quarters in the Old Illinois Central Train Station. In 1978, the Mansion reopened as a historic house museum.
Read more about this topic: Old Louisiana Governor's Mansion
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“We aspire to be something more than stupid and timid chattels, pretending to read history and our Bibles, but desecrating every house and every day we breathe in.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The best history is but like the art of Rembrandt; it casts a vivid light on certain selected causes, on those which were best and greatest; it leaves all the rest in shadow and unseen.”
—Walter Bagehot (1826–1877)
“The history of work has been, in part, the history of the worker’s body. Production depended on what the body could accomplish with strength and skill. Techniques that improve output have been driven by a general desire to decrease the pain of labor as well as by employers’ intentions to escape dependency upon that knowledge which only the sentient laboring body could provide.”
—Shoshana Zuboff (b. 1951)