In 1958, Cheri McDaniel was a 30-year-old hospital dietitian who longed to be a stay-at-home mom to her only child. So she came up with an unconventional plan, as Business Report details in a feature from its current issue.
On a bitter January day she told her husband about it: she was going to design and build homes nine months out of the year and take the summers off. And with that proclamation she became the first female homebuilder in Baton Rouge.
The powder-blue sign and dainty script reading “Cheri Homes Inc., Built with a Woman’s Touch” was the last thing anyone in Baton Rouge expected to see pounded into the dirt of a newly framed house in the male-dominated 1960s—especially a home being custom built for a petroleum or chemical engineer, the predominant client in those days.
Though McDaniel had designed her and her husband’s first home in El Dorado, Arkansas, she had never studied architecture or drafting and had little experience in construction. Without formal training, she relied on her instincts and keen ability to visualize buildings before they were ever built, and she did much of her learning on the job.
She had grown up in rural Union Parish, inside a four-room house with no electricity or plumbing through Depression-era poverty, yet she went on to design, build and decorate lavish homes and gardens.
“I had a quarter-inch-scale ruler and a pen, and I would just draw out my famous one-page plan,” McDaniel jokingly recalls of her early days in business. In one instance, a couple’s floor plan was drawn up on the back of a Fonzie poster taken off her daughter’s wall when she couldn’t find any paper.
Over her 30-year career in homebuilding, she completed some 300 homes, earning the respect of her fellow contractors, craftsmen and clients along the way. She built 75 homes in Sherwood Forest, 62 in Parkview Oaks, as well as others in Shenandoah, Plantation Trace, Walden, Hickory Ridge and Pollard Estates, and even a few in Port Allen, Zachary, Baker and Denham Springs.
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