Ashland Plantation, Greek Revival plantation house in Darrow, Louisiana

Ashland Plantation is a sixty-foot-square, two-story Greek Revival mansion built of the traditional antebellum style, with 28 columns each three feet square and thirty-five feet high. Twelve-foot-wide galleries wrap around the building on both floors. It stands on the estate south of Geismar, Louisiana, on Highway 3251, surrounded by the Shell Chemical plant.

Construction on the mansion began in 1839 and was completed in 1841 for Duncan Farrar Kenner, who named the estate Ashland in 1844 after Henry Clay's Kentucky home. The Freedmen's Bureau confiscated the property in 1865 and returned it to Kenner in 1866. In 1889 it was auctioned and renamed Belle Helene by George Balthazar Reuss for his daughter Helene. Shell acquired the estate in 1992 and completed a full restoration in 2015.

The mansion reflects how wealthy sugar plantation owners displayed their prosperity through grand architecture and spacious galleries that dominated the landscape. The scale and decoration reveal the priorities and status of those who built it.

Shell Oil Company bought the estate, including 102 acres, from the Hayward family in 1992; the property lies within the Shell Chemical LP Geismar plant, south of Geismar on Highway 3251 near its junction with Louisiana Highway 75. The mansion is used for private corporate and employee functions, so it is not open to the public and visits must be arranged in advance.

Abe Hawkins, an enslaved jockey at Ashland, rode Lecomte to beat Lexington in New Orleans in 1854. After the Civil War he left the plantation and in 1866 won the Travers Stakes on Merrill for Robert A. Alexander, trained by former slave Ansel Williamson, before 25,000 spectators in New York. He died of tuberculosis at Ashland in 1867.