Scott Bakula Visits The Whitney Museum In New Orleans

By Jane Lasky

NCIS: New Orleans star Scott Bakula cherishes the many memories he has experienced while working in and around the incomparable Crescent City. One time, his mother and his mother-in-law visited the Southern location and the actor decided to take the two women to the Whitney Plantation Museum, a place Bakula calls "a remarkable museum honoring slaves and their story here in Louisiana."

Their reaction to the three-year-old attraction was most memorable. "We were moved. It wasn't what we were expecting," states this discerning performer who plays Dwayne Pride on the CBS drama.

Whitney Plantation Museum

What these visitors discovered at America's first slavery museum, located 35 miles west of NOLA on the west bank of the Mississippi near Wallace in Louisiana's St. John the Baptist Parish, was 40 acres of land where slaves worked for more than a century. Now, this same location, still planted with sugar cane, is decked out in all kinds of fine art like life-size sculptures of children, symbolizing the thousands who died while in slavery. In fact, memorials are posted all over these grounds in all kinds of ways, such as on imposing granite walls carrying the names of more than 100,000 slaves who lived in Louisiana prior to 1820.

Experience French Creole Architecture And Antiques

Also on tap at the Whitney Plantation Museum is the opportunity to experience the main house, built in 1803, done in French Creole architecture and filled with antiques; Louisiana's sole surviving French Creole barn; and slave quarters and a slave jail. You may recognize these digs if you saw the Quentin Tarantino's "Django Unchained," since the 2012 movie used this top historical venue, which includes a trio of archeological sites, as one of the stylized film's many distinctive locations.

Discover more of mighty NOLA by watching NCIS: New Orleans. Season 4 airs on Tuesdays at 10 p.m./ET, 9 p.m/C.