## Introduction  
The Whitney Plantation is located near Wallace on the west bank of the Mississippi River in St. John the Baptist Parish, Louisiana. Ambroise Heidel (1702 to circa 1770), the founder of this plantation, emigrated from Germany to Louisiana in 1721. He was one of thousands of German settlers brought to Louisiana by the French West India Company. They settled along the Mississippi River above New Orleans on the corridor eventually known as the Côte des Allemands (the German Coast). Ambroise Heidel became a modest farmer, beginning his career with a single pig as his livestock. In 1752, he bought the original tract of land of this plantation and became wealthy by planting indigo and rice. His son, Jean Jacques Haydel Sr., made the transition from indigo to sugar cane in the early nineteenth century. The Haydel family continued to run the plantation until 1860. In 1867 Bradish Johnson, a businessman born in Louisiana and raised in New York, bought the plantation and later renamed it after his grandson, Harry Whitney. Until then, the plantation had been called Habitation Haydel. Ownership of the land changed many times. From 1990 to 1999, the Formosa Chemicals and Fibre Corporation owned the property and intended to build the world's largest rayon factory there. However, the rayon business declined and Whitney was sold to its current owners, the Cummings family of New Orleans.