Oakley House was constructed between 1813 and 1815. The rear loggias were enclosed, full-length rear porches were added to the rear, and other changes were made to the ground floor between 1817 and 1818. Finishing and painting continued until 1820. Mail studies confirm the dating sequence established by dated receipts and letters pre-served in family records.
On June 18, 1821, the painter, John James Audubon, arrived at Oakley Plantation to tutor the surviving daughter, Eliza Pirrie. He remained there only four months, but while in residence he began many of the wildlife paintings for which he is famous. His journal indicates that the house was completed and was an "opulent abode."
In 1823, Eliza Pirrie ran away from home to marry a neighbor, Robert Barrow, who died within a month. Her father, James Pirrie, died in 1824 and his widow, Lucretia, in 1833. After this house was abandoned by family descendants with only the plantation overseer maintaining residence.
Around 1842, the daughter, Eliza Pirrie Barrow Bowman Lyons, returned to Oakley with her third husband, Henry Lyons. It may have been at this time that Oakley House underwent a second renovation. Black marble mantles were installed in one room, and a great deal of new furniture was purchased.
Eliza Pirrie Lyons died in 1851. Her daughter, Isabelle Lowrie Bowman married William Wilson Matthews the same year, and they took up residence in Oakley House. They remained in residence until the civil war threatened plantation life in the area. Isabelle Matthews moved to New Orleans. In 1872, the house was reported in dilapidated condition--the gallery sills rotted out and the posts hanging from the roof. Internal evidence of water damage shows that the roof developed leaks. Extensive repairs to the rear cabinet rooms were required. Within a year, the house had been (rather poorly) repaired and the Wilson Matthews family returned to take up permanent residence. Their daughters, Ida and Lucinda Matthews, lived at Oakley Plantation until 1942. The house was sold to the state of Louisiana in 1947.
Oakley House underwent an extensive renovation in 1950-52 under the firm of Koch and Wilson of New Orleans. Much of the plaster was removed from the house, with the exception of that in the rear loggias and bedrooms; most of the original split wooden lath was retained. The house was first opened to the public in 1954. It was again renovated in 1977 under the firm of Perry L. Brown, Architects. The galleries including their plates were replaced with new material. In 1995, another renovation was undertaken by the state. Plaster in the rear bedrooms was replaced,and the doorway between the ground floor dining room and the rear warming room--door which has been closed perhaps since 1820--was opened again.
Beginning in the 1760's, Anglo settlers began to establish farms and cotton plantations in the Feliciana parishes of Louisiana. In the period following 1790, several forms of traditional folk houses were constructed in the Florida parishes and in southern Mississippi. One of these was the raised tidewater cottage. Those which survive were built by Anglo settlers in the first decades of the nineteenth century. Considerable misunderstanding surrounds these houses from French Louisiana that there is a popular conception that Oakley represents a blending of French and Anglo architecture; but its relationship to French Creole architecture is problematic. Oakley Plantation House is, perhaps, the finest surviving historic example of Louisiana's rare Anglo Tidewater Creole architecture.
Oakley shares many features with the Creole architecture of southern French Louisiana and the gulf coast. Both Anglo and French Creole houses were characterized by full-length front verandas covered by double-pitch roofs. Oakley's plan is a hall-and-parlor, one room deep, augmented with small "cabinets" placed at the rear corners. Between the two cabinets is a loggia facing the rear. Loggias were often open, forming a smaller rear gallery, but at Oakley the loggia was enclosed early in its history. All of these features would seem to link Oakley to the architecture of French Louisiana, but close inspection reveals no French influence in this house. Its geometry is subtly different from French tradition, with more elongated rooms and with exterior chimneys. Oakley's gabled roof differs from the hip roof style favored by the French Creoles for raised plantation houses of this size.
Oakley contains none of the classic features of French Creole construction technology. There is no heavy roof ridge supported by king posts, nor are the ceiling joists dovetailed into the principal wall plates. The footing of truss blades and rafters on thin false plates at Oakley is unknown in French Creole Charpente, where, instead truss blades are set into mortises near the ends of the tie beams and rafters are notched over the exterior plates with birds-mouth notches. In sum, Oakley House is completely Anglo-American in construction technology, federal in decorative design, and tidewater (Anglo) Creole in plan type and form.
As one of only four surviving raised Creole cottages in the Felicianas, Oakley is of pivotal significance in assessing the cultural and architectural history of Anglo settlement in this area. The decorative features, construction technology, and the geometry all link it closely to raised tidewater cottages being built along the coast of North Carolina in the eighteenth century. Oakley fits entirely within the tidewater tradition of 1740-1790. Since that tradition is geometrically and historically a form of Caribbean Creole architecture, it demonstrates that two entirely separate traditions of Creole architecture were implanted in Louisiana in the colonial period. Ultimately, both traditions may be traced to islands in the West Indies, but via very different routes.