Oak Alley and Whitney come from similar pasts, but their present-day uses is where they take off in different directions. While Whitney has embraced its past as a slave plantation and is using that to educate and inform, Oak Alley hides its past in a tab that I only found on their website by googling “Oak Alley slavery.” I would consider Whitney a museum because it goes to great lengths to be a historically accurate representation of what went on at that plantation in the eighteenth century. The purpose of the present-day Whitney museum is educational and the tours given focus on the people who worked there. They provide exhibits with memorial murals and hundreds of first hand narratives regarding the history associated with the Whitney Plantation. The Whitney website even has a dedicated education tab that you can further delve into to learn the history of the slaves and the owners who resided over this plantation. In addition to this the information provided is factual and credible and, according to Whitney, serves to provide readers and visitors with new perspective.
Oak Alley is much less of a museum. It is an inn, restaurant, and an event venue which lets guests opt into their slight nod to the history of the plantation. Oak Alley is not a museum or even an “unconventional” museum and this can be discerned from the image they project on the home page of their website. While Oak Alley does have tours of the plantation, they are not advertised or emphasized nearly as much as everything else and only provides a small blurb as to what the plantation represents and what the tour would include. It is but a small asset in the entire operation and this can clearly be seen when clicking on the plantation link where it refers to several other plantations in the area
Comparing the two sights on their aesthetic also gives some indication of the aforementioned affinities for the sites respective approach to presenting the stark history associated with their plantations. The Whitney site is a more low-scale, simple website that focuses on providing crucial information for attending a tour and reading the information they provide. The main page has a nice rotating banner but aside from that has no other moving parts; The rest of the page is just viable information for their location and obtaining tickets. The Oak Alley site on the other hand has a much more flashy design filled with many rotating banners and advertisements and many things to click on from their main page. There are links to their dining experiences, hosting an event, and reserving a night at one their cottages, as well as the same size link for plantation tours.
The Whitney website presents a site that seems solely purposed to provide readers and tourists a way to actually learn about the history and gain new perspective (the optimal goal of most if not all museums), while the Oak Valley website serves as a directory for all their departments, including a plantation tour. This website does not serve as a means towards attending a museum, or at least a dedicated one.