In August of 2024 Greenfield Louisiana, LLC announced that they were abandoning their $800 million dollar plans to construct a grain terminal on the West Bank of St. John the Baptist Parish within the historic African-American community of Wallace, LA and directly adjacent to nationally significant Whitney and Evergreen Plantations. The threat posed by the grain terminal led to the listing of the West Bank of St. John the Baptist Parish as one of America’s 11 Most Endangered Places in 2023.

Over three years, a coalition of local, state, and national preservation advocates participated in a highly contentious Section 106 review of the project administered by the Army Corps of Engineers. This session will review a timeline of the Section 106 consultation for this project and the many, many strategies employed by advocates. Hear from the local non-profit the Descendants Project, the Louisiana Trust for Historic Preservation, and the National Trust, as we tell the story of efforts to preserve the historically significant landscape along the West Bank of St. John the Baptist Parish.

Learning Objectives:

• Understand how the federal Section 106 consultation process works.
• Discover strategies used by Louisiana advocates as they worked to save the historic resources along the West Bank of St. John’s Parish, one of the few places along the Mississippi River near New Orleans that has not been re-developed for industrial use.
• Hear how advocates determined the impacts of the proposal of one of the largest grain elevators in the world on one of Louisiana’s parishes and across the state.
• Learn about the extant historic resources, including two National Historic Landmark sites, in St. John’s Parish and the area’s cultural landscape.