The first place my guide Scott and I visited on my Historic Pensacola Village trip was Julee Cottage. Built in 1805, this cottage was owned and occupied by Julee Panton, who was a colored freed slave who was a legend in the area. The cottage is a simple building of bleached wood that is common architecture of the Creole who lived on the Gulf of Mexico in the 19th Century. Scott said that many Creole, Spanish, and French fled to Pensacola from Louisiana after the 1803 Louisiana Purchase that turned Louisiana over to the USA from France and made it a state.
The second stop on our tour was into The Lavalle House. This house was also built in 1805, but it is more of a colonial style with the exterior painted in bright colors. Scott and I went inside this house, and it would be the only house without air-conditioning.
The Lavalle House was built as a duplex in which two families were crammed into two rooms each in a tiny space. The interior was simple, and the bedroom/living area was in the front of the house. A four-poster bed and chest dominated the room and there was a fireplace on the far wall in the room. Very quaint.
After touring the front room, Scott and I went into the kitchen. When this house was first build, Scott said, the kitchen was kept in a separate building outside the house to prevent fires from the open fire and stove. Today, the kitchen is attached to the back of the house, and it was simply decorated with intricately carved cabinetry and an open fireplace/stove with all of its original cookware and cutlery. If you wanted some sugar, you took this mallet shaped gadget and chopped off a chunk with the sharp handle and then pulverised it with the mallet end. We take our five-pound packages of sugar for granted today!
It was starting to boil inside the un-airconditioned Lavalle Home, so Scott and I decided to head outside to the garden. I checked out the garden and noticed some vines hanging off the fences and asked Scott what they were, and they were pumpkins. It reminded me of the spaghetti and zucchini squashes coming into my garden.
After checking out the garden, Scott and I headed to our next destination, The Dorr House (1871) and some air-conditioning!