Life-size sculptures of slave children haunt the clapboard church on the grounds of the old sugar cane plantation, where ceramic heads of black men will soon sway on pikes in the Louisiana breeze.

Unlike other plantation museums along the Great River Road between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, the newly opened and under-construction Whitney Plantation focuses squarely on the plight of slaves.

While nearby sites highlight their antebellum architecture and the lifestyles of the white people who lived there, only 11 minutes of the roughly two-hour Whitney Plantation tour are devoted to the grand house where the German-American masters resided.