Biedenharn Museum and Gardens

Joseph Biedenharn ran a candy and soda business in Vicksburg, Mississippi, where Coca-Cola was sold as a fountain drink. In 1894, wanting to get the popular beverage out to rural customers far from any soda fountain, he began bottling it, becoming the first person to do so and helping launch the bottled-soda industry that would carry Coca-Cola around the world.

Biedenharn later moved his family and business interests to Monroe, Louisiana, where he prospered and became a leading citizen. The home he built there, and the gardens his family created, are now preserved as a museum that tells his story and the larger story of an American product that grew from a local fountain drink into a global icon.

The Biedenharn family home, built in the early 1900s on Riverside Drive overlooking the Ouachita River, is preserved and furnished much as the family kept it. Its rooms reflect the comfortable, cultured life of a successful early-twentieth-century family, with period furnishings, decorative arts, and family belongings.

The house anchors the estate and connects visitors to the Biedenharns as people, not just names. Touring it gives a sense of Monroe's own history as a river city and of the family whose business success made the surrounding gardens and collections possible.

The formal gardens were the creation of Emy-Lou Biedenharn, Joseph's daughter, a singer who traveled widely in Europe and drew inspiration from the great gardens she saw abroad. She transformed the family grounds into a series of formal spaces with fountains, roses, seasonal plantings, and a conservatory.

The result is one of the loveliest garden retreats in north Louisiana, a place of order and color set against the river. The gardens shift with the seasons, brightest in spring and fall, and they remain the estate's most beloved feature, an oasis in the middle of the city.

The estate also houses a Bible museum, a reflection of the family's deep faith and Emy-Lou's collecting. It holds rare and antique Bibles, some centuries old, along with religious artifacts, illustrating the long history of the printed scripture and the traditions surrounding it.

Together the three parts of the estate, the home, the gardens, and the Bible collection, make the Biedenharn an unusually varied stop. It is a place where American commercial history, European-inspired horticulture, and religious heritage meet on a single riverside property in Monroe.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.