The Home Stretch

Starting more than two hundred years ago, some of America’s grandest residences were constructed along a roughly hundred-mile stretch of the Mississippi River, running from New Orleans westward toward Baton Rouge, Louisiana’s capital.

“Plenty of dwellings all the way, on both banks—standing so close together, for long distances, that the broad river lying between the two rows, becomes a sort of spacious street,” Mark Twain wrote in in the