This two-and-a-half-story wooden house was originally part of a larger Promised Land sugar plantation. In 1925 Leander Perez (1891–1969), the infamous political boss of Plaquemines Parish, purchased the home, and he would occupy it until the early 1960s. Surrounded by a gallery on two stories, the house has a rear ell kitchen and a central staircase that leads to the principal floor on the second story. The remodeling of the house probably took place when Perez first occupied it. A large dormer containing a sleeping porch was added, and the roof was given red tiles. The gallery’s first­floor concrete block piers, which are cast to resemble stone, suggest that the house has been raised. Slender fluted square posts are on the gallery’s upper level.

Sold by the Perez family several years after Leander’s death, Promised Land is still maintained as a private home. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1997.

Adapted from Karen Kingsley’s Buildings of Louisiana, part of the Buildings of the United States series commissioned by the Society of Architectural Historians (www.sah.org) and published by Oxford University Press.