French Colonial

French Colonial houses raise the main living floor above the ground, on a brick ground story or on piers, and surround it with a gallery, a wide covered porch running the full width of the front and often along the sides. A steep hipped roof, sloping on all four sides, extends over the galleries. Rooms open directly onto the gallery through French doors. Walls were often built of upright timber posts filled in with bousillage, a mix of mud, moss and animal hair, and covered with plaster or stucco.

Madame John's Legacy in the French Quarter of New Orleans (1788) has a full-height brick ground story with a wood-framed main floor above. The Ursuline Convent in New Orleans was completed around 1752. Parlange Plantation in Mix, Louisiana (about 1754), and Destrehan Plantation in St. Charles Parish (about 1787) are raised houses with galleries. The Louis Bolduc House in Ste. Geneviève, Missouri (about 1792), has walls of upright logs.

France founded the colony of Louisiana in 1699. French settlers built along the Gulf Coast and the lower Mississippi, and in the Illinois Country, the upper Mississippi Valley in present-day Illinois and Missouri. Builders framed walls with vertical logs, either set directly in the ground (poteaux-en-terre) or on a horizontal sill (poteaux-sur-sol), and raised the living floor on a basement. The full front porch is believed to have come from the French Caribbean.

Spain took control of Louisiana in the 1760s. After fires in 1788 and 1794 much of New Orleans was rebuilt, and Madame John's Legacy was rebuilt in 1788 from the materials of an earlier house on the site. Builders kept the raised plan and galleries. The smaller Creole cottage was most common on the Gulf Coast from about 1790 to 1840, and after the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, houses built in the 1820s and 1830s added Federal and Greek Revival details and central hallways. Ste. Geneviève National Historical Park, established in 2020, preserves one of the highest concentrations of these vertical-log houses.