The Plantation House in Tiger Bend (alternatively called Eola and Haasville) appears to extend back to Roger Banks Marshall before the 1840s. Roger's son, T. Douglas Marshall, lived with his family there in the 1840s. After the Civil War, his daughter and son-in-law, Maccie and Alex Haas, lived in the house. When Alex and his second wife moved to New Orleans in the 1890s, Alex’s son, A. Marshall Haas and his family, lived in the home. By the 1910s the family only spent summers in the house and eventually it was abandoned and destroyed sometime in the 1970s.
The name Northup referred to in this article was Solomon Northup, a free-born black man who was kidnapped and sold into slavery and wrote the book “Twelve Years a Slave” which recounted his experience at various plantations in Avoyelles Parish before being freed in 1853.
The Bunkie Record, Thurs 17 Apr 1997 p. 2
The Old Plantation Home
By Sue Eakin (from her regular column, Great day a-comin’)
Some years ago Paul and I went out to the Tiger Bend area so he could photograph an old plantation house at Eola, which was going to be torn down shortly. At the time it was filled with bales of hay, but in spite of that the place was beautiful. Its gaping holes where plank had been removed and its broken windows and falling doors seemed strange in such a magnificent structure.
The house was located across Bayou Boeuf from the Edwin Epps house, and I had never been able to document the owner of the house. According to Northup, Douglas Marshall, who lived there, killed an Opelousas lawyer during the period when Northup was at the Epps plantation. Dr. W.D. Haas wrote that Douglas Marshall was his grandfather, but finding Douglas Marshall’s name in public records has seemed impossible. Years after the Civil War this was the home of Dr. and Mrs. A.M. Haas and family, which included three well-known teachers at Bunkie High School—Helen Haas Ducote and the late Mary and Kaye Haas. Great-granddaughter Alice Holland recalled the name of the house as “Grey Gables.”
Certainly, it was the most magnificent constructed house I’ve seen anywhere, and I’ve been in a lot of them. The highly skilled work of master craftsmen could still be seen in various places where the carvings of door and window facings were awesome. It was hard to believe that that wonderful staircase had been allowed to fall. It looked like one in a Hollywood movie portraying the most elegant of houses.
All these years I had continued to check and double-check records to find out more about Douglas Marshall. Recent trips to the Avoyelles Parish Courthouse and to Alexandria Genealogical and Historical Library only brought more mystery: Douglas Marshall’s name was listed in neither the U.S. Census or in Conveyance records at Marksville. Searching through my own collection of books Sunday, I found the answer-or part of it. Douglas Marshall, the grandfather of Dr. W. D. Haas, was the son of Roger Banks Marshall, whose home Paul had photographed at Evergreen. Roger Banks Marshall was a big landowner and apparently owning the plantation where his son, Douglas, lived and is listed as its owner. Both men are buried in Evergreen in a small family graveyard that the older Marshall had evidently established there.
As for the wonderful old house, my guess was that there was no money back during the Depression to maintain the huge place, and it was in a rather isolated place somebody thought more useful for raising crops. In any case, in today’s climate it would have been a treasure indeed.
1899 - 1992