Carver-Becnel Contract

Carver-Becnel Contract

Timber Frame Documentary Evidence

These short paragraphs given an overview of the tasks that Pierre Becnel contracted with John Carver to perform on the main house of Evergreen Plantation

P. C. Becnel and John Carver

St. John the Baptist Parish Court House Notarial Records

St. John the Baptist Parish Court House Notarial Records

April 3, 1832

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St. John the Baptist Parish Court House Notarial Records

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Documents

This contract comes before the bankruptcy of 1835, and shows Becnel contracting with a builder named John Carver to have the two wings of the house removed and many other tasks. Of important note for the portion which states, "[T]he said Carver engages to do therein all the wooden work consisting chiefly in door and window frames, floors, ceilings, doors, shutters, sashes &c." This brief quotation and the thoroughly described plan that follows is clearly too much work for any one person to do alone, and it seems highly unlikely that Carver, or anyone else really in 1832 south Louisiana, would be doing this work without any enslaved people.

This kind of wording in the contract, though, helps fuel the idea today in the public imagination that white people were doing the bulk of the work, or at least what gets deemed as "skilled labor." Although one might could indeed say that Carver was a skilled woodworker, the idea that he would or even could do all this work alone is frankly preposterous and does not align with the historic evidence even at Evergreen itself, which shows just three years later a list of the enslaved which includes Gabriel, a carpenter so skilled that he alone is worth $1,200, which is the value of all twelve of the enslaved peoples' homes combined.