CÉLINE FOSTER WALKER

Today's visitor to the Balembouche Estate in St. Lucia will find a charming colonial home nestled between century old trees, flowering bougainvilleas and singing birds. A careful inspection of the spacious grounds will reveal rusting machinery, relics of what was the Balembouche sugar plantation and sugar refinery of the 19th century... If these relics could talk they would speak of the time, beginning in the 1830's, when Louis Gaillard de Laubenque, his wife Flore d'Encausse de Labatut and their three children, Irma, Jules and Flavien lived there. Louis and his family were part of the French plantation owner class which for one reason or another found itself on this French West Indian island and whose members earned their living by producing sugar and exporting it to Europe. Today the sugar plantations are gone and with them the French plantation owners. However, vestiges of their earlier presence remain in many of the present day St. Lucians whose ascendants were the offspring of..

Also known as: Gaillard de Laubenque