Armand Gabriel Allard Duplantier

(1753 - 1827)

   "So we beat on, boats against the current,
   borne back ceaselessly into the past ."

                    F. Scott Fitzgerald
                    The Great Gatsby

Family History

Voiron and Grenoble, France, are the ancestral hometowns of the Allard du Plantier family. The documented history of the family generally starts with Antoine Allard (living in Voiron c. 1620). His son, Guy Allard, was counselor to King Louis XIV and counselor at the Parliament at Dauphine and a provincial official in Grenoble. An accomplished historian, Guy published sixty volumes of historical manuscript material and at his death in 1716 at age 81 he was still researching manuscript volumes for publication.

Among Guy’s many children was Antoine Allard du Plantier (1680-1748), husband of Catherine Beyle and great-uncle of Marie-Henri Beyle 1783-1842, famous 19th century French writer, better known by his penname Stendhal.
Antoine’s son Joseph Antoine Guy Allard du Plantier (1721-1801) was a delegate from the province of Dauphine to the French National Assembly and Deputy to the Estates General during the French Revolution in 1788-1789. Joseph had three children including, Armand Gabriel Allard du Plantier, the first of the du Plantier family to come to America.

Armand served in a French military regiment that was sent by King Louis XVI to America to aid the rebellious colonies in the Revolutionary War against Great Britain. Not obtaining the command that he sought, despite a direct written plea to Gen. George Washington, Armand left for the then-Spanish colony of Louisiana where his maternal uncle, Claude Trenonay, owned an indigo plantation in the region of Point-Coupee, where Armand arrived on March 21, 1781. Trenonay had entreated his sister, Armand’s mother, to send Armand to Louisiana, to assist in the management of his significant landholdings.

Within but a few months of his arrival, Armand married Trenonay’s step-daughter, Marie Augustine Gerard, who bore him six children, four of whom survived to adulthood, before her death from Yellow Fever in 1799. Two years later, the widower Armand married Constance Rochon Joyce, the widow of John Joyce. Constance had inherited from the late husband the significant and important Magnolia Mound Plantation and its 900 acres located just downriver from the then small town of Baton Rouge. Armand moved to Magnolia Mound with his children and Constance bore him five more children, completing the first American-born generation of the Duplantier family.

Magnolia Mound

Please click The Cottage on the Mound to read about the history of the eighteenth century Spanish land patent and the pioneers who sought to create both a home and a community from the riverfront wilderness south of the village of Baton Rouge.

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