Lynette Ater Tanner

Lynette Ater Tanner was born in Central Illinois to a farming family but moved to Louisiana at age eight. Lynette and her husband, Buddy, are in the cotton business as producers, ginners, and warehouse owners. In the l990's they saved from destruction twenty historical plantation buildings including a National Register steam cotton gin. At the request of Lynette's mother and area tourism officials, Lynette, a former teacher, researched and developed a guided tour of their Frogmore Plantation. Using archival documents, the tour relates cotton and life on a plantation evolving from the 1700's through today's computerized farming and ginning. Fascinated by the first-hand narrations of former slaves and sharecroppers, Lynette wrote a history of the vast Louisiana territory as the intro in her book Chained to the Land and included 42 of the ex-slave testimonies. She also had it translated into French naming it ENCHAINES A LA TERRE. Lynette has written and directs four unique, guided tours, some with live vocalists, relating the former slave and sharecropper memories: Cotton Then & Now, The Delta Music tour, The Plantation Civil War, and Christmas on the Plantation. The tour has been selected by Rand McNally as one of their rare "Must See Sites in the South" and won the Rural Tourism Award by the State of Louisiana. The property has been featured in the PBS documentary "The Making of Slavery in America" along with many other films, magazines, and travel shows.