Fall in the Felicianas: Glorious Gardens, Gallivanting Ghosts, and a Gathering of Artists
By Anne Butler

On her honeymoon Grand Tour through Europe in 1835, 18-year-old bride Martha Barrow Turnbull fell in love with the gardens of Versailles and other continental landscapes, gleaning the inspiration for formal plantings to complement the stately double-galleried plantation home being built on her cotton plantation back home. Thus began a sixty-year love affair with the 28-acre gardens of Rosedown, meticulously preserved in near-daily diary entries that later proved invaluable in restoring the property.

Blessed with rich land, long growing seasons, a felicitous climate and unlimited labor, Martha Turnbull became one of the great horticultural innovators of her day, the Rosedown gardens serving as early proving grounds for the exotic flora of the Orient. Camellias, for example, were thriving in gardens in Japan and China centuries before they were first seen by Europeans. It was only after trade with the Orient was opened in the early 1500s by the Portuguese and their Black Ships that trading groups like England’s East India Company began importing spices, silks, porcelains and other Oriental treasures. The medical officers of those trade companies first studied the native plants for their medicinal propensities, and the camellia japonica was introduced to England by the 1700s and then crossed the ocean to the East Coast. By 1830s invoices among the Rosedown archival papers show camellias, azaleas and other plants being purchased from nurseries in New York and Philadelphia.


Testament to the hardiness of early plantings, many of the heirloom plantings of Rosedown survive or have been propagated, even though the post-Civil War era brought great hardship. Martha Turnbull applied for a widow’s pension (she received $8 monthly) and initiated a Civil War claim covering property taken from Rosedown by federal troops in 1863 that included 300 hogsheads of sugar, 600 barrels of molasses, 200 mules and 100 horses, 700 head of cattle, 80 wagons, 300 hogs, 6000 bushels of corn, 50 bales of cotton. The third-generation descendants of Martha Turnbull who struggled to maintain the property were spinster sisters who sometimes had to pay with cotton bales their accounts at the local mercantile, the invoices of 1896 including such varied goods as a tub of lard, nails, syrup, lap robe and whip, spectacles, and a metallic casket for $100, presumably for their grandmother who died that year.

It would be the surviving plantings that saved Rosedown when a Texas oil heiress, herself a great horticulturist, passed through on a national garden club tour in 1956 and saw the potential beneath the rampant jungle growth outside and cracked peeling plaster inside. Purchasing the property from Martha Turnbull’s great-grandchildren, she began the ten-year restoration of house and grounds that turned Rosedown Plantation into one of the country’s premier historic tour destinations.

A century after Rosedown was built in 1834, author Stark Young used it as a picturesque setting in his acclaimed Civil War novel So Red The Rose, saying, “Of all the houses in the world it seemed to be the beloved of its own trees and gardens.” That charm and appeal continues unabated today, the house folded in the embrace of its 19th-century gardens and live oaks grown to immense size.

Now it is a state historic site and national historic landmark, its fall and winter-blooming camellia sasanquas and japonicas grown to tree-size, and serves as one of the most inviting features of the 29th annual Southern Garden Symposium.

Set for October 20 and 21 (registration deadline October 13), the symposium combines top-quality expert speakers and glorious garden settings with engaging social events and historic venues to attract gardening enthusiasts from across the south. Gourmet lunch in the ruins gardens of Afton Villa Plantation, speakers’ gala at Rosale Plantation, afternoon tea at Dogwood complement carefully chosen presentations on everything from orchids to medicinal marijuana, from Thomas Jefferson’s botanical laboratory at Monticello to the challenges of invasive species. Morning and afternoon sessions explore Martha Turnbulls’ grand gardens at Rosedown so participants can admire centuries-old camellias, live oaks and other plantings as well as hear about present-day efforts to ensure that the gardens continue to thrive into the future. Online information on schedules and tickets is available at www.southerngardensymposium.org. Proceeds fund such projects as scholarships to LSU’s School of Landscape Architecture and garden enhancements at state historic sites.

The sheer beauty of the cultivated landscapes and the verdant wild woodlands in the St. Francisville area have inspired creative artists ever since John James Audubon painted a number of his famous bird studies in the area, and the arts scene is growing just as prolifically as the glorious gardens. The Yellow Leaf Arts Festival, Saturday and Sunday, October 28 and 29th from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., is sponsored annually by Arts For All (the local arts umbrella agency whose name says it all). The weekend celebrates that rich tradition of artistic inspiration by filling St. Francisville’s downtown oak-shaded Parker Park with an incredible selection of music and art and food and fun.

Featured artist this year is versatile Acadian artist-naturalist Jim Jeansonne, whose colorful woodcut of butterflies graces the Yellow Leaf poster. He will be in the park gazebo. One of the original founding artists of the Baton Rouge Gallery, Jeansonne’s creative endeavors run the gamut from printmaking to sculpture, furniture making, and photography. Festival musicians performing include the Fugitive Poets, Wilder Janes, Nancy Roppolo, Bill Romano and others, while local farmer Jerry Landrum and his family offer sweet potatoes in many forms plus great barbecue.

Other events in October include the Angola Prison Rodeo every Sunday throughout the month; grounds open at 9 with inmate arts/crafts, food and music, rodeo starts at 2 (visitors should remember that this is a penitentiary and they would be well advised to follow regulations to the letter). Halloween activities include The Myrtles Halloween Extravaganza every Friday, Saturday and Sunday in October beginning at 5 p.m. and guaranteed to scare the pants off visitors touring this “most haunted house in America” (call 225-635-6277 for information); Movie in the Park from 6 to 8 on Friday the 13th is The Incredibles, with snacks and drinks (bring your own lawn chair or quilt); “Trunk or Treat” at the West Feliciana Sports Park beginning at 6 p.m. on October 26 with costume and trunk decoration competitions (call 225-784-8447 for information on candy distribution and decorating trunks); and Trick Or Treating through downtown St. Francisville from 6 to 8 on Halloween.

Located on US Highway 61 on the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge, LA, and Natchez, MS, the St. Francisville area is a year-round tourist destination. A number of splendidly restored plantation homes are open for tours: The Cottage Plantation (weekends), Myrtles Plantation, Greenwood Plantation, plus Catalpa Plantation by reservation; Afton Villa Gardens and Imahara’s Botanical Garden are open in season and are both spectacular. Particularly important to tourism in the area are its two significant state historic sites, Rosedown Plantation and Oakley Plantation in the Audubon state site, which offer periodic living-history demonstrations to allow visitors to experience 19th-century plantation life and customs (Oakley’s main house is temporarily closed for lead abatement, but the wonderful visitor center/museum remains accessible).

The nearby Tunica Hills region offers unmatched recreational activities in its unspoiled wilderness areas—hiking, biking and especially bicycle racing due to the challenging terrain, birding, photography, hunting, and kayaking on Bayou Sara. There are unique art galleries plus specialty and antiques shops, many in restored historic structures, and some nice restaurants throughout the St. Francisville area serving everything from ethnic cuisine to seafood and classic Louisiana favorites. For overnight stays, the area offers some of the state’s most popular Bed & Breakfasts, including historic plantations, lakeside clubhouses and beautiful townhouses right in the middle of St. Francisville’s extensive National Register-listed historic district, and there are also modern motel accommodations for large bus groups.
For visitor information, call West Feliciana Tourist Commission and West Feliciana Historical Society at 225-6330 or 225-635-4224, or St. Francisville Main Street at 225-635-3873; online visit www.westfeliciana.us, www.stfrancisvillefestivals.com, www.stfrancisville.net or www.stfrancisville.us (the events calendar gives dates and information on special activities).

Afton Villa Gardens: the plantation, the gardens, the gardener and the book

Afton Villa Gardens: the plantation, the gardens, the gardener and the book
By Anne Butler

Newly established contemporary gardens can showcase the latest in horticultural research, the newest plant varieties, the most up-to-date techniques. Old gardens, on the other hand, those glorious few left from the 19th century when gardening benefitted from unlimited labor, rich soil and the happy climate of south Louisiana, have a charm and character that can't be matched, the secret shadows and sun-dappled parterres of plantation pleasure grounds adorned with latticed summerhouses and brick pathways, with always a pleasant scent perfuming the air.
But combine the two, the historic and the modern, and the result would be magical, only attainable through a certain vision for what might be appropriate and a sensitivity to the spirit of the original without slavishly attempting an exact recreation. And that's just what the incredible grounds and gardens of Afton Villa are today, not so much a restoration as a rebirth, all thanks largely to Genevieve Munson Trimble.
Only one who dearly loves gardens and gardening would have been so bold (or foolhardy) as to undertake such an overwhelming project requiring not only fortitude but plenty of funding as well, for Afton Villa was a wreck in 1972 when Gen Trimble and her late husband Bud saved the property from development. The Afton Villa house, a fairytale Victorian Gothic castle with towers and turrets and forty rooms, had been lost to fire in 1963, and the extensive surrounding gardens, though brought back from ruin time and again through their history since the 1840s, were in sad shape.
The Trimbles not only determined to undertake the project, but persevered through four decades of voracious deer and marauding wild boar, pond levee blowouts and the savage winds of hurricanes uprooting enormous trees and altering the understory sun/shade dynamic more than once.
With the invaluable assistance of eminent landscape architect Dr. Neil Odenwald and hardworking head gardener/manager Ivy Jones, they worked a miracle, preserving and rejuvenating the gardens of Afton Villa not as a restoration but "as a reflection of their own sense of garden design." Today the famous half-mile oak allee, landscaped terraces and garden rooms, including the "garden in the ruins" on the brick foundations where the home once stood in this area historically known as the garden spot of the South, are among the St. Francisville area's most popular tourist and wedding destinations. And all it took was forty years of blood, sweat and tears, not to mention some 8,000 tulips, many thousand daffodils and narcissi, masses of bedding plants and azaleas, more than 250 pots filled with blossoming annuals, and some magnificent Italian statues overseeing with aplomb the house site that has been transformed from a place of tragedy into a place of beauty.
Now LSU Press has published Genevieve Munson Trimble's book, AFTON VILLA; BIRTH AND REBIRTH OF A 19-CENTURY LOUISIANA GARDEN, with gorgeous color images by several Louisiana photographers and from the author's personal collection. Successes, failures, struggles and triumphs, Mrs. Trimble includes it all, including her explanation of the necessity of respecting the soul of the old landscape. "We resolved to restore the spirit of the original garden, and to protect it as well. We would beautify, enhance, even superimpose our own ideas, but at the same time we would be very careful never in any way to obliterate the original footprint of the garden or the house. Whenever possible, we would use old nineteenth-century plants and ornamentation such as might have conceivably been contained there originally, but in the interest of practicality, availability and maintenance, we would be willing to make substitutions, so long as they were compatible with the spirit of the garden. What do I mean, one may ask, when I say the spirit of the garden? To me it means the ambiance that permeates or surrounds a garden. At Afton, I am referring to the almost indefinable aura of past grandeur and, even more than this, the ability to have sustained and risen above the rigors of unbearable tragedy."
This gracious gardener, she of the perfectly coiffed white hair and ever-stylish colorful outfits, hesitated in despair upon entering the avenue to Afton for the first time after the death of her husband in 2004. And then she caught sight of the old oak that stood alone at the end of the drive overlooking the ruins, planted by Bartholomew Barrow in 1828, witness to war and reconstruction, deaths and depressions, neglect and the ravages of winds and fire. And the old oak still stood, proud, covered in the resurrection fern that springs back to life after each rainfall, "symbol of endurance and a triumph of nature to overcome all disasters that would befall. Wasn't this, I thought with sudden clarity, exactly what had drawn Bud and me here in the first place? It was Afton Villa's miraculous ability to have risen, phoenixlike, out of the ashes of tragedy....I could not leave this garden behind."
Mrs. Trimble has received widespread recognition and many prestigious awards for her rescue of the Afton Villa Gardens as well as a number of significant projects in New Orleans. Her book is available at area bookstores and online, and the West Feliciana Historical Society in March joined the Southern Garden Symposium to host an immensely successful book-signing reception at Afton Villa.
The gardens of Afton Villa are open for public enjoyment seasonally, six months of the year; closed July, August, and September during summer heat and hurricane season, also closed January and February in the dead of winter. Other extensive gardens in the St. Francisville area that may be visited are Rosedown State Historic Site's 27 acres of 19th-century heirloom plantings and Imahara's Botanical Garden. A number of fine private landscapes are shown on the Spring Garden Stroll April 30, sponsored by the Feliciana Master Gardeners of the LSU Ag Center.
Located on US Highway 61 on the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge, LA, and
Natchez, MS, the St. Francisville area is a year-round tourist destination. A number of splendidly restored plantation homes are open for tours: the Cottage Plantation, Myrtles Plantation, Greenwood Plantation, plus Catalpa Plantation by reservation; Afton Villa Gardens and Imahara's Botanical Garden are open in season and are both spectacular. Particularly important to tourism in the area are its two significant state historic sites, Rosedown Plantation and Oakley Plantation in the Audubon state site, which offer periodic living-history demonstrations to allow visitors to experience 19th-century plantation life and customs (state budget constraints have unfortunately shuttered Oakley Monday and Tuesday).
The nearby Tunica Hills region offers unmatched recreational activities in its unspoiled wilderness areas—hiking, biking and especially bicycle racing due to the challenging terrain, birding, photography, hunting, and kayaking on Bayou Sara. There are unique art galleries plus specialty and antiques shops, many in restored historic structures, and some nice restaurants throughout the St. Francisville area serving everything from ethnic cuisine to seafood and classic Louisiana favorites. For overnight stays, the area offers some of the state's most popular Bed & Breakfasts, including historic plantations, lakeside clubhouses and beautiful townhouses right in the middle of St. Francisville's extensive National Register-listed historic district, and there are also modern motel accommodations for large bus groups.
For visitor information, call West Feliciana Tourist Commission and West Feliciana Historical Society at 225-6330 or 225-635-4224, or St. Francisville Main Street at 225-635-3873; online visit www.stfrancisvillefestivals.com, www.stfrancisville.net or www.stfrancisville.us (the events calendar gives dates and information on special

October in St. Francisville Brings Out Colorful Leaves…and Colorful Characters

October in St. Francisville Brings Out Colorful Leaves…and Colorful Characters

By Anne Butler

Hollywood veteran and ageless beauty Andie MacDowell was recently quoted as saying Southern people are crazy and she’s thankful for having grown up as part of that, recognizing the richness a little local color and a lot of local characters can add to life. If ever there were a living breathing example of that, it’s little St. Francisville, Louisiana, where eccentricity is not just tolerated but enthusiastically embraced.

From the late lamented town jailer who covered his bald pate with everything from Elvis pompadours to orange poodle-curl wigs, to the overgrown child who saddled up his three-wheel bicycle and patrolled the streets handing out speeding tickets to unsuspecting tourists, from the hard-drinking pistol-packing mama who wore a pirate’s eyepatch and drove a herd of her own cattle to LSU during the Depression to pay her tuition, to the savant who picks up trash along the roadways while reading Charles Dickens, and the mysterious Orthodox priest stalking the streets in long flowing black robes, St. Francisville has certainly harbored its share of colorful and well-loved characters.

So it’s appropriate that the town’s celebrations of life, its festivals, are just as colorful. And in October, they run the gamut from ghosts to garden-club ladies sipping tea, from fearless inmate roughriders to artists and crafters under the ancient live oaks of the town park. And every one of these diverse celebrations adds to the richness of life in this southern small town. Says Andie McDowell, “People say reading Faulkner is hard because he’s all over the place, but for me it’s easy—I’m right there with him.” And you can be, too.

October is crowded with events allowing visitors to sample first-hand St. Francisville’s beloved quirkiness.  This being the season of witches and goblins, The Myrtles Halloween Experience scares the pants off visitors every Friday, Saturday, Sunday and October 31 from 6 to 9 in a historic plantation house calling itself the most haunted in America (for tickets, telephone 800-809-0565). Indeed, when the attached gift shop caught fire not long ago, the ghosts were said to have saved the 1790s main house (the local firefighters just might’ve helped, too).

For a taste of authentic historic funeral customs, nearby Rosedown Plantation State Historic Site is dressed in mourning garb October 27 through November 3. On October 31 at 4 p.m. the costumed staff of this National Historic Landmark relates Soul Stories of Rosedown family members’ lives and deaths.

Every Sunday in October, the Angola Prison Rodeo draws more than 10,000 eager spectators to witness death-defying bravado in events like bareback bronc or bull riding, wild cow milking, wild horse race, buddy pick-up, bulldogging, inmate poker (last one seated wins, the other players having been hooked sky-high by charging brahma bulls), Bust Out (six bulls released at once) and the crowd-pleasing Guts and Glory when inmates on foot try to snatch a $100 chit from a bull’s horns. “The Wildest Show in the South, ” which keeps the audience on the edge of their seats from the moment the black-clad Angola Rough Riders charge into the arena at break-neck speed, also features prisoner hobbycraft sales, tons of food, and inmate bands. Other than the ladies’ barrel racing, all rodeo participants are inmates in this enormous maximum-security prison. Grounds open at 9 for the arts and crafts, and the fascinating state museum at the entrance gate will also be open. The rodeo starts at 2, and advance tickets are a must (www.angolarodeo.com provides information and spells out regulations which must be observed on prison property).
Somewhat more sedate activities are offered October 10 and 11th at the 26^th annual Southern Garden Symposium, a series of entertainments, workshops, tours, demonstrations and lectures by prestigious speakers in this the land of glorious antebellum gardens. Workshop topics this year include floral design, container gardening, edible garnishes, plant structures, gardening for birds and bees, heirloom bulbs and period architecture, and landscape design over the years (www.southerngardensymposium.org).

The last weekend of October, the 25^th and 26^th, the Yellow Leaf Arts Festival is a gathering of dozens of artists and crafters demonstrating and selling their wares in downtown oak-shaded Parker Park. This 12^th annual event sponsored by the umbrella arts organization called Arts For All to celebrate all arts for all persons, Yellow Leaf 2014 brings together more than 55 artists, plus live music, fun children’s activities, and food including locally grown sweet potatoes. New this year is a Native Bird Photography Contest, and just down Burnett Road from Yellow Leaf on Saturday, the Friends of the Library hold a book sale at the wonderful new parish library.

Arts For All calls the Yellow Leaf Festival a celebration of the “friendly, relaxed, authentic, small-town quaintness that is St. Francisville” (for information, www.artsforall.felicianalocal.com).

For this and every other October event, the town welcomes visitors to revel in its pervasive local color and meet its local characters to understand just what actress Andie McDowell was talking about, that wonderful richness of life in a small southern town.

And the events just keep rolling along through fall into winter. November 15 the Louisiana Vets Fest in the West Feliciana Parish Sports Park supports and celebrates veterans of all wars with children’s activities, military displays, hotly contested cook-off contests providing plenty of good food, and exciting live music including Marcia Ball and Jimmie Vaughn (http://lavetsfest.org). And December brings the well-established and well-loved small-town holiday celebration called Christmas in the Country, with shop open houses, strolling musicians, lively parade (this year on Sunday rather than the customary Saturday afternoon due to election run-offs requiring that polling places not be blocked), and an afternoon house tour benefitting the new parish library.

Located on US Highway 61 on the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge, LA, and Natchez, MS, the St. Francisville area is a year-round tourist destination.  A number of restored plantation homes are open for tours daily: Cottage Plantation, Myrtles Plantation, Greenwood Plantation, plus Catalpa Plantation by reservation; Afton Villa Gardens and Imahara’s Botanical Garden are open in season. Particularly important to tourism in the area are its two significant state historic sites, Rosedown Plantation and Oakley Plantation in the Audubon state site, which offer fascinating living-history demonstrations some weekends to allow visitors to experience 19^th-century plantation life and customs (state budget constraints have unfortunately shuttered Oakley Sunday and Monday).

The nearby Tunica Hills region offers recreational activities in its unspoiled wilderness areas—hiking, biking, birding, photography, hunting. There are unique art galleries plus specialty shops, many in restored historic structures, and restaurants serving everything from ethnic cuisine (Chinese, Mexican, most recently Lebanese) to seafood and classic Louisiana favorites. For overnight stays, the area offers some of the state’s most popular Bed & Breakfasts, including historic plantations, lakeside clubhouses and beautiful townhouses right in the middle of St. Francisville’s extensive National Register historic district; there are also motel accommodations for bus groups.

For visitor information, call St. Francisville Main Street at 225-635-3873 or West Feliciana Tourist Commission at 225-6330 or 225-635-4224; online visit www.stfrancisvillefestivals.com, www.stfrancisville.net or www.stfrancisville.us (the events calendar gives dates and information on special activities, including the Farmers Market on Thursday mornings).

A CENTURY OF SERVICE IN ST. FRANCISVILLE, LA
BY Anne Butler

Russell Daniel and his father in spiffy hats and suits in downtown Baton Rouge.

He’s in his 80s now, but it’s an absolute miracle Mr. Russell Daniel survived his childhood. Born in 1928, he was a tiny tot when he ran into the arc of a blade wielded by his grandfather, Robert Clifford Brasseaux, who was chopping on a tree with a double-bitted axe. The gash on the left side of young Russell’s face required a number of stitches to close. And then, still a child, he fell out of a tree and nearly killed himself.

Today this white-haired, soft-spoken man, called by his sister-in-law “a real old-time southern gentleman,” is semi-retired from the family gas distributorship, which was recently officially recognized for a full century of service to the community, its provision of services exemplary and its devotion to its customers noteworthy. “Semi-retired,” of course, means that he only goes into the office in the mornings, after breakfasting with buddies at a local café, and then again in the afternoons, just to help his son, you know.

He’s one of the multitude of distinguished descendants of family patriarch Robert Daniel, Junior, born in 1824 and father of some 15 children, many of them sons who, along with their own remarkable progeny, have left their mark on West Feliciana agriculture and business. Russell Daniel’s grandfather John Robert (known as J. Bob) worked with Governor Parker to establish a notable stock farm in the parish; Russell’s own father died in his thirties, which left young Russell and his mother Myrtle to live with her parents in St. Francisville on Royal Street.

Russell and Betty Sue Kendrick Daniel cut the cake at their wedding.

Myrtle’s father Robert Clifford Brasseaux brought the first gasoline distributorship to the area in 1910 and sold kerosene to the little isolated country stores that kept hand-cranked drums of it on their porches for customers in the days before electricity. The kerosene was sent up from the Esso refinery in Baton Rouge by way of the LR&N railway, and Brasseaux unloaded the tank cars into barrels hauled by a mule-drawn wagon.

Upon the advent of automobile traffic, the enterprising Mr. Brasseaux also opened the first service station in St. Francisville. It was located at the upper corner of Royal and Ferdinand Streets in the store/residence of his father-in-law Henry Temple, who had come over from Germany in the mid-19th century. After Russell served in the armed forces and married vivacious Betty Sue Kendrick upon her college graduation in 1951, he assumed management of the business his grandfather had begun, now known as Russell Daniel Oil Company, providing accommodating service to the farmers and other residents of West Feliciana Parish for more than a century.

The oil company and service station across US Highway 61 from it have a long list of loyal customers, as do other long-established businesses located in historic downtown St. Francisville, listed as an extensive Historic District on the National Register. These join more recently established businesses in sponsoring an event called Polos and Pearls, highlight of August in St. Francisville, designed to add some sizzle to summer shopping and entice customers downtown the evening of August 23, beginning at 5 p.m. All the interesting little shops and galleries offer lots of extras---refreshments, music or other entertainment, and plenty of bargains, making shopping after dark just plain fun.

Betty Sue Kendrick Daniel clowns around with a friend.

As the advent of autumn brings cooler temperatures, St. Francisville offers plenty of special events. The Hummingbird Festival on September 13 provides the opportunity to observe these amazing little birds up close as professional wildlife biologists band and weigh them before releasing them to continue their fall migration patterns.

October is crowded with events every weekend. The Angola Prison Rodeo draws some 10,000 eager spectators every Sunday in October, and the Myrtles Halloween Experience scares the pants off visitors every Friday, Saturday, Sunday and October 31 from 6 to 9 in a historic plantation house calling itself the most haunted in America. October 10 and 11 marks the 26th annual Southern Garden Symposium, a series of entertainments, workshops, tours, demonstrations and lectures by prestigious speakers in this the land of glorious antebellum gardens. The last weekend of October, the Yellow Leaf Arts Festival is a gathering of dozens of artists and crafts persons demonstrating and selling their wares in downtown Parker Park.

November 15 the Louisiana Vets Fest in the West Feliciana Parish Sports Park supports and celebrates veterans of all wars with children’s activities, military displays, hotly contested cook-off contests providing plenty of good food, and exciting live music including Marcia Ball and Jimmie Vaughn. And December brings the well-established and well-loved small-town holiday celebration called Christmas in the Country, with shop open houses, strolling musicians, lively parade, and a Sunday afternoon house tour benefitting the new parish library.

Located on US Highway 61 on the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge, LA, and Natchez, MS, the St. Francisville area is a year-round tourist destination. A number of restored plantation homes are open for tours daily: Cottage Plantation, Myrtles Plantation, Greenwood Plantation, plus Catalpa Plantation by reservation; Afton Villa Gardens and Imahara’s Botanical Garden are open in season. Particularly important to tourism in the area are its two significant state historic sites, Rosedown Plantation and Oakley Plantation in the Audubon state site, which offer fascinating living-history demonstrations some weekends to allow visitors to experience 19th-century plantation life and customs (state budget constraints have unfortunately shuttered Oakley Sunday and Monday).

The nearby Tunica Hills region offers recreational activities in its unspoiled wilderness areas—hiking, biking, birding, photography, hunting. There are unique art galleries plus specialty shops, many in restored historic structures, and restaurants serving everything from ethnic cuisine to seafood and classic Louisiana favorites. For overnight stays, the area offers some of the state’s most popular Bed & Breakfasts, including historic plantations, lakeside clubhouses and beautiful townhouses right in the middle of St. Francisville’s extensive National Register historic district; there are also motel accommodations for bus groups.

For visitor information, call West Feliciana Tourist Commission and West Feliciana Historical Society’s museum and tourist information center at 225-6330 or 225-635-4224 or St. Francisville Main Street at 225-635-3873; online visit www.stfrancisvillefestivals.com, www.stfrancisville.net or www.stfrancisville.us (the events calendar gives dates and information on special activities).

Tilling The Soil Through Time

St. Francisville, LA: Tilling The Soil Through Time
By Anne Butler

In 1831 the Encyclopaedia Americana called the District of Nueva Feliciana the garden of Louisiana, its rich well-watered soils and happy climate perfect for the cultivation of gardens both pragmatic and merely pleasing to the senses.
The first cash crops, indigo and cotton, corn and sugarcane, were planted as soon as the fields were laboriously cleared. Each early dwelling had its kitchen garden and truck patch for growing foodstuffs for family and farm animals, plus herbs for cooking as well as medicinal purposes. And once those plantings had been established and the pioneering families prospered, attention turned to ornamental gardens, formal parterres and orderly bordered beds of flowering shrubs—azaleas, camellias, sweet olive and hip gardenia, climbing roses and other heritage plants. Some of these 19th-century gardens still exist, most notably Rosedown and Afton Villa, and these historic plantings have been joined by equally impressive contemporary landscaping like Imahara’s Botanical.
The weekly Farmers’ Market, open Thursday and Saturday mornings, allows present-day farmers the opportunity to share the fruits of their labors, but in May the St. Francisville area also hosts two special events celebrating several very different aspects of its long gardening tradition.
On Saturday, May 3, the Feliciana Horticulture Society, Master Gardeners of the LSU Ag Center, host their 10th annual St. Francisville Spring Garden Stroll, showcasing eight unique town and country plantings on morning and afternoon self-guided tours. The featured private gardens—two in St. Francisville’s downtown historic district, two in the country on LA 421, four in Plantation Oaks subdivision—incorporate a wide variety of landscapes and plant varieties sure to inspire gardening enthusiasts. Container gardening, vegetable and herb gardens, water features, an orchard, steep wooded ravines, meandering pathways, formal parterres and rustic fences, patios, courtyards, and thoughtful combinations of cultivated plantings seamlessly fused with wild plants, all are sure to give visiting gardeners new ideas to incorporate in their own landscapes.
As LSU AgCenter horticultural expert Dr. Dan Gill says, “A garden tour is not just an opportunity to learn; it can inspire you to change who you are as a gardener.” Proceeds benefit 4-H scholarships, school gardens and other community beautification projects. Tickets are $20 and may be purchased in advance or on the day of the Stroll at Jackson Hall of Grace Episcopal Church on Ferdinand St. in downtown St. Francisville, and information is available by telephone (225-635-3614) or online at www.stfrancisvillespringstroll.org or by email (abrock@agcenter.lsu.edu).
In stark contrast to the Garden Stroll is a Smithsonian Institution exhibit hosted by the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola Museum. “The Way We Worked,” a travelling exhibition exploring the professions and people that have traditionally sustained American society as part of our workforce, represents the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities’ participation in the Museum on Main Street project, a national/state/local partnership designed to bring cultural programs and exhibits to rural areas. Tracing the developments affecting the workforce over the past century and a half, “The Way We Worked” draws on the rich collections of the National Archives, including vintage images, film and audio accounts, all telling the compelling story of how work impacts the cultural fabric of our lives.
The exhibit at Angola’s museum from May 17 through June 29 is especially meaningful in this rural area where agriculture, most recently the cultivation and canning of sweet potato crops, has for centuries played such an important role. Called “Farming on the Farm, Agricultural Operations at Angola,” it focuses on the extensive agricultural operations on this sprawling 18,000-acre penitentiary comprised of several antebellum plantation properties. Scholarly presentations, films and oral histories will augment the exhibition, and visitors will have the opportunity to add their own work experiences to Smithsonian archival records. Work chants and music both old and new, plus tastings of agricultural produce prepared by inmate chefs in Angola’s culinary program, will heighten the experience.
Located just outside the entrance gates of the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola on LA 66, the Tunica Trace, the Angola Museum is open Monday through Friday 9 to 4:30, Saturday 8 to 4, closed Sunday. For information on this free exhibit, telephone 225-655-2592 or visit online www.angolamuseum.org.
Located on US Highway 61 on the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge, LA, and Natchez, MS, the St. Francisville area is a year-round tourist destination. A number of restored plantation homes are open for tours daily: Cottage Plantation, Myrtles Plantation, Greenwood Plantation, plus Catalpa Plantation by reservation; Afton Villa Gardens and Imahara’s Botanical Garden are open in season, and spring is definitely the season for spectacular bloom. Particularly important to tourism in the area are its two significant state historic sites, Rosedown Plantation and Oakley Plantation in the Audubon state site, which offer fascinating living-history demonstrations some weekends to allow visitors to experience 19th-century plantation life and customs (state budget constraints have unfortunately shuttered Oakley Sunday and Monday).
The nearby Tunica Hills region offers recreational activities in its unspoiled wilderness areas—hiking, biking, birding, photography, hunting. There are unique art galleries plus specialty shops, many in restored historic structures, and restaurants serving everything from ethnic cuisine to seafood and classic Louisiana favorites. For overnight stays, the area offers some of the state’s most popular Bed & Breakfasts, including historic plantations, lakeside clubhouses and beautiful townhouses right in the middle of St. Francisville’s extensive National Register historic district; there are also motel accommodations for bus groups.
For visitor information, call West Feliciana Tourist Commission and West Feliciana Historical Society’s museum and tourist information center at 225-6330 or 225-635-4224 or St. Francisville Main Street at 225-635-3873; online visit www.stfrancisvillefestivals.com, www.stfrancisville.net or www.stfrancisville.us (the events calendar gives dates and information on special activities).

Flags Over St. Francisville
By Anne Butler

Market Hall photo by Gail Chisum

The St. Francisville area is so incredibly scenic that since the days of Audubon it has inspired artists and writers, photographers and painters. It still does. Several local artists have galleries in the historic district downtown, and the West Feliciana Historical Society’s museum-headquarters on Ferdinand Street displays a nice selection of coffee table photography books with glorious images of the area’s landscapes and architecture.

Being released this month is yet another, Flags Along the Way: A Pictorial Journey Through the History of West Feliciana, which promises to supplement the current crop of picture books nicely. Just as every good painter has his own unique style, so every good photographer has his own eye. There can never be too many books preserving parish history in images and print, particularly since fragile old plantation homes are so vulnerable to fires and storms and other destructive elements. What’s here today may well be gone tomorrow.

Methodist Church photo by Gail Chisum

Both text and photography in this new book are by Gail L. Chisum, who was born in Oklahoma, raised in Maryland, and attended Ouachita Baptist University in Arkansas on a photo journalism scholarship. After serving in Viet Nam, he returned to the states, where he had a distinguished career in insurance and financial services with Farm Bureau all over the state of Louisiana.

Retirement brought a renewed passion for photography, especially with the advent of digital photography which found him, 40 years after doing college sports photography, now carrying a digital 35mm with 400mm lens at LSU football games. His dream in 2011 was to produce a book on LSU’s season all the way to a national championship, but in the title game Alabama put an abrupt halt to those plans.

By the 1990s Chisum and his family had settled in West Feliciana, where the sense of history is palpable and the numerous historic signs whet his appetite to learn more. After sharing with Farm Bureau colleagues his enthusiasm for combining his interest in parish history with his passion for photography, he found himself the recipient of a fine new Canon camera as a retirement gift. As he says, “I walked out the door of one career to begin another, as an author and photographer of history of the area where I lived.”

Afton Villa Gardens - photo by Gail Chisum

A full year of painstaking research and reading, home visits and interviews with property owners followed. Museum director Helen Williams was a tremendous help, and eventually Chisum filled over 250 pages with fine photographs and in-depth histories. He very sensibly divided the book into chapters according to the many flags that have flown over the area---France, England, Spain, Republic of West Florida, Louisiana, Confederacy, United States.

Flags Along the Way will be available in downtown St. Francisville at the West Feliciana Historical Society museum and at Bohemianville Antiques, where the author will have a book signing on May 3. His next project is even more ambitious: photographing the 59 National Parks across the country, so be sure to catch him while he is still in town!

Beginning April 24, the twenty-first annual Cajun Jeep Jamboree brings off-road enthusiasts to the St. Francisville area for two days of guided trail rides through the challenging hilly terrain of West Feliciana. The event is open to all Jeep brand vehicles, and registration information is available at www.jeepjamboreeusa.com.

Oakely House - photo by Gail Chisum

The Angola Prison Rodeo always draws big crowds of visitors to the St. Francisville area in April; this year’s spring edition is April 26 and 27. From the time the mounted black-clad Angola Rough Riders race at break-neck speed into the arena, flags streaming and hooves flying, visitors are on the edges of their seats through events pitting inmates against pro-stock Brahma bulls and wild-eyed bucking broncos. Ladies’ barrel racing is the only non-inmate event in what is called the longest running prison rodeo, begun in the 1960s and now celebrating half a century of thrills and spills.

Crowd favorites are the events unique to Angola, including the crowd-pleasing "Guts and Glory", an arena full of inmates on foot trying to remove a $100 chit tied between the horns of the meanest Brahma bull around. Rodeo events begin at 2 p.m., but the grounds open at 9 a.m. for a huge arts and crafts sale showcasing inmate talent in hobbycraft like jewelry, hand-tooled leather, paintings and woodwork both large and small, from children’s toys to garden furniture. Special activities for children include pony rides and an antique carousel, space walks and carnival games. Inmate bands perform throughout the day, and a large number of concession stands offer a variety of food and drink, with the stands providing shaded seating for more than 10,000 cheering spectators. Tickets ($20 premium, $15 regular seating) should be purchased in advance (online at www.angolarodeo.com or by telephone on weekdays 8:30-4 (225) 655-2030 or (225) 655-2607).

Visitors should allow time to tour the fascinating prison museum just outside the front entrance gates to learn more about the history of this enormous maximum-security penitentiary. It should be noted that there are specific regulations with which visitors must comply when entering prison grounds; no food, drink, cell phones or cameras are allowed through the rodeo entrance gate, and on prison property no weapons, ammunition, alcohol or drugs are permitted; purses and bags will be searched and all vehicles must be locked when unoccupied.

Museum - photo by Gail Chisum

Located on US Highway 61 on the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge, LA, and
Natchez, MS, the St. Francisville area is a year-round tourist destination. A number of restored plantation homes are open for tours daily: Cottage Plantation, Myrtles Plantation, Greenwood Plantation, plus Catalpa Plantation by reservation; Afton Villa Gardens and Imahara’s Botanical Garden are open in season, and spring is definitely the season for spectacular bloom. Particularly important to tourism in the area are its two significant state historic sites, Rosedown Plantation and Oakley Plantation in the Audubon state site, which offer fascinating living-history demonstrations some weekends to allow visitors to experience 19th-century plantation life and customs (state budget constraints have unfortunately shuttered Oakley Sunday and Monday).

The nearby Tunica Hills region offers recreational activities in its unspoiled wilderness areas—hiking, biking, birding, photography, hunting. There are unique art galleries plus specialty shops, many in restored historic structures, and restaurants serving everything from ethnic cuisine to seafood and classic Louisiana favorites. For overnight stays, the area offers some of the state’s most popular Bed & Breakfasts, including historic plantations, lakeside clubhouses and beautiful townhouses right in the middle of St. Francisville’s extensive National Register historic district; there are also motel accommodations for bus groups.

For visitor information, call West Feliciana Tourist Commission and West Feliciana Historical Society’s museum and tourist information center at 225-6330 or 225-635-4224 or St. Francisville Main Street at 225-635-3873; online visit www.stfrancisvillefestivals.com, www.stfrancisville.net or www.stfrancisville.us (the events calendar gives dates and information on special activities).

AUDUBON PILGRIMAGE SURE SIGN OF SPRING IN ST. FRANCISVILLE
By Anne Butler

The forty-third annual Audubon Pilgrimage March 21, 22 and 23, 2014, celebrates a southern spring in St. Francisville, the glorious garden spot of Louisiana’s English Plantation Country. The ice storms of winter may have confused the plants, but savvy pilgrims know it’s spring when the West Feliciana Historical Society throws open the doors of significant historic structures to commemorate artist-naturalist John James Audubon’s stay as he painted a number of his famous bird studies and tutored the daughter of Oakley Plantation’s Pirrie family, beautiful young Eliza. And regardless of the winter weather, the azaleas always come through with spectacular bloom just in time for the pilgrimage.

Carefully selected features this year—three antebellum homes in the countryside and one townhouse-- illustrate the grand good luck of needy historic homes fortunate enough to fall into the hands of dedicated and knowledgeable preservationists.

Overlooking Little Bayou Sara from a high bluff along the Tunica Trace, Live Oak is one of the earliest plantation homes in the Felicianas, built around 1808 on part of a 1796 Spanish land grant by Elijah Adams. A splendid two-story structure with four sturdy brick columns across the lower gallery and five slender wooden ones across the upper one, the home shows both Spanish and Anglo-American architectural influences, with steep unbroken roofline, thick brick walls that taper upwards, and exterior staircases as well as a tiny hidden indoor stair. Unlike later Greek Revival structures, the house has no central hall; instead, rooms open to the outside for ventilation. There are seven fireplaces, and the sturdy framing beams are of pit-sawn red cypress and blue poplar, notched and pegged together.

In 1824 Live Oak was acquired by Bennett Barrow, and a century later Katherine Towles LeSassier and her husband operated a post office and school for neighborhood children who arrived on horseback. By the 1960’s, Live Oak was unoccupied; cattle grazed on the grounds, the back porch had fallen off, the third-floor attic was full of rats and bats and wasps. None of which deterred dedicated preservationist Sue Turner, who with her husband purchased the house in 1975, having loved it ever since receiving as a young girl a small watercolor of it by artist Charles Reineke purchased in New Orleans. They immediately commenced a sensitive and thorough restoration under the direction of restoration architect Samuel Wilson.

Also now in the Weyanoke plantation community, Sunnyside was languishing abandoned in a field in Pointe Coupee until a dedicated historian trucked it across the Mississippi River bridge and reassembled it on a treeless sweet potato field. Sunnyside was built near Lettsworth in 1838 for Laura Thomas, niece of General Philemon Thomas, hero of the 1810 West Florida Rebellion and the War of 1812. She was 15 when she was married Charles Tessier, and after her death in 1852 Sunnyside was occupied by the plantation overseer and not subjected to modern improvements, remaining a veritable time capsule.

Still, only an experienced eye would have noticed the potential in the unpretentious little story-and-a-half structure with its rusted tin roof sitting abandoned in an overgrown field near Lettsworth. Fortunately, David Floyd, Rural Life Museum director and longtime preservationist, had the requisite experienced eye, recognizing immediately that this typical bluffland house type, vernacular architecture at its best, would fit in perfectly with neighboring historic homes in Weyanoke. And so the little Sunnyside house was meticulously disassembled and moved, then put back together. Its lumbering trip across the old bridge at Baton Rouge in December 1997 made the television news more than once.

Sunnyside’s lush landscaping is a tribute to Floyd’s beloved longtime mentor, the late landscape architect Steele Burden. Maturing live oaks line the drive from the Tunica Trace, a crape myrtle tunnel draws the visitor through the pieux picket fence to the patterned plantings at the entrance, and a side potager of herbs and vegetables is presided over by a traditional weathered dovecote. Eminently suited to this 19th-century home, these plantings anchor the house beautifully to its site.
Nydrie is a handsome raised Creole cottage that was filled with stored hay until salvaged and relocated from Tangipahoa. Constructed in the 1850s in Tangipahoa near the Confederate training camp called Camp Moore, it was used as a hospital during the Civil War. The upper floor was the living space, while the open lower level, its walls of old brick upwards of 16” thick, was used as a rustic dirt-floored carriageway for wagons and buggies. In 1997, the upper floor of the house was cut in half and moved on two 18-wheelers to property originally part of Rosedown Plantation; the upper walls and floors, all of wood, proved to be in remarkably good condition, as were the upstairs doors. The hip roof, removed prior to the relocation, was replaced with a new gable one. The downstairs brick, some so old they had embedded animal footprints, were saved and reused.
Today spacious rooms flank a wide center hallway on the upstairs “premier etage,” and the lower floor has been enclosed as well. The house has been beautifully furnished with an eclectic collection reflecting the diverse tastes and extensive travels of the owners, Earl and Anne S. Eichins, New Orleanians who found refuge in St. Francisville after Hurricane Katrina. Now both occupants and home have been admirably settled into their new location, the old house grounded by terraces of old brick, arbors hung with climbing roses and a parterre garden.

In town, the comfortable little cottage called Ardisia has benefitted from a succession of master builders enhancing its charms through the generations. Its hilltop site provided an ideal vantage point for viewing the passage of history, adjacent to the courthouse square and overlooking the major thoroughfare traversed by cattle drives and cotton wagons en route to the Mississippi River port of Bayou Sara below the hill.

As the area struggled to recover from the Civil War, court documents seem to indicate that the property was owned by William Walter Leake, respected judge, bank president and state legislator who raised 11 children in the Barrow House on connecting property facing Royal St. When Johnson Street was carved out to connect Royal and Ferdinand Sts., it separated several lots facing Ferdinand that in 1878 had been sold to Thomas Raynham of a family of expert craftsmen, joiners and brickmasons whose skills were evident in beautiful Grace Church.

In 1919, widowed Mary Ann Raynham’s will left to her niece Mamie Levert “my three lots with house and all improvements thereon facing Ferdinand in the town of St. Francisville, also six silver teaspoons.” Mamie’s relative Thomas Raynham, that English-born master builder, had constructed for her a comfortable bungalow overlooking Ferdinand Street, where her husband Dr. Eloi Levert kept a medical office in a front room. On the adjacent lot Mamie inherited from her aunt was a cottage for their cook Aunt Nellie. When Mamie died in 1939, this property was sold for $3,500 to Willie Randolph Cason, whose son-in-law, Rodney Cassagne, was a master carpenter.

The house now called Ardisia, originally two front rooms, two rear cabinets or small rooms, and at least one dirt-floored room, really began to take shape as Cassagne replaced the roof, added two back rooms and stair, reframed the second floor, poured concrete for the front porch; bricks from the original fireplace formed the front walk. In 1985 Cason heirs sold the property for more than $41,000. Current owner Melissa Higgins moved to St. Francisville in 2002, found the occupants of this little hilltop cottage erecting a For Sale sign, and bought it practically the same day.

Other features of the 2014 Audubon Pilgrimage include Afton Villa Gardens, Audubon (Oakley) and Rosedown State Historic Sites, three 19th-century churches in town and beautiful St. Mary’s in the country, plus the Rural Homestead with lively demonstrations of the rustic skills of daily pioneer life. Audubon Market Hall houses the popular antique show and sale, and the Audubon Play will be performed several times daily on Saturday and Sunday in recently restored Temple Sinai. Daytime features are open 9:30 to 5; Friday evening activities are scheduled from 6 to 9 p.m., Saturday soiree begins at 7 p.m.
The Historic District around Royal Street is filled during the day with the happy sounds of costumed children singing and dancing the Maypole; in the evening as candles flicker and fireflies flit among the ancient moss-draped live oaks, there is no place more inviting for a leisurely stroll. Friday evening features old-time Hymn Singing at the United Methodist Church, Audubon Play in Temple Sinai, Graveyard Tours at Grace Episcopal cemetery (last tour begins at 8:15 p.m.), and a wine and cheese reception at Bishop Jackson Hall (7 to 9 p.m.) featuring Vintage Dancers and young ladies modeling the pilgrimage’s exquisitely detailed 1820’s evening costumes, nationally recognized for their authenticity. Light Up The Night, the Saturday evening soiree, features live music and dancing, dinner and drinks beginning at 7 p.m.

For tickets and tour information, contact West Feliciana Historical Society, Box 338, St. Francisville, LA 70775; phone 225-635-6330 or 225-635-4224; online www.audubonpilgrimage.info, email sf@audubonpilgrimage.info . New this year is a package including daytime tours, evening entertainment Friday and Saturday, and a Saturday picnic lunch. Tickets can be purchased at the Historical Society Museum on Ferdinand Street.

Located on US Highway 61 on the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge, LA, and
Natchez, MS, the St. Francisville area is a year-round tourist destination. A number of restored plantation homes are open for tours daily: Cottage Plantation, Myrtles Plantation, Greenwood Plantation, plus Catalpa Plantation by reservation; Afton Villa Gardens and Imahara’s Botanical Garden are open in season. Particularly important to tourism in the area are its two significant state historic sites, Rosedown Plantation and Oakley Plantation in the Audubon state site, which offer fascinating living-history demonstrations some weekends to allow visitors to experience 19th-century plantation life and customs (state budget constraints have unfortunately shuttered Oakley Sunday and Monday).

The nearby Tunica Hills region offers recreational activities in its unspoiled wilderness areas—hiking, biking, birding, photography, hunting. There are unique art galleries plus specialty and shops, many in restored historic structures, and restaurants serving everything from ethnic cuisine to seafood and classic Louisiana favorites. For overnight stays, the area offers some of the state’s most popular Bed & Breakfasts, including historic plantations, lakeside clubhouses and beautiful townhouses right in the middle of St. Francisville’s extensive National Register historic district; there are also motel accommodations for bus groups.

For visitor information, call St. Francisville Main Street at 225-635-3873 or West Feliciana Tourist Commission at 225-6330 or 225-635-4224; online visit www.stfrancisvillefestivals.com, www.stfrancisville.net or www.stfrancisville.us (the events calendar gives dates and information on special activities).

ONLY IN ST. FRANCISVILLE

By Anne Butler

Audubon Pilgrimage

Tourism in Louisiana is big business, generating some $10.7 billion in annual spending by more than 26 million visitors. Lt. Governor Jay Dardenne, head of the Department of Culture, Recreation and Tourism, is introducing a new marketing campaign for 2014 with emphasis on Louisiana’s cultural diversity. Its tagline is “Only in Louisiana,” a slogan promoting the state as a unique cultural destination, and St. Francisville fits right into that marketing campaign with a number of site-specific local offerings ranging from the country’s largest bald cypress tree to a museum full of compelling exhibits on the hair-raising history of the country’s largest and most infamous maximum-security prison.


This little 19th-century rivertown has always had an abiding sense of place and respect for its history as English Louisiana’s plantation country, which for more than four decades has been shared with visitors at the annual spring Audubon Pilgrimage, one of the state’s longest running and most professionally presented historic home tours. Most recently attention has turned to enhancing awareness of the area’s early Jewish immigrants; the turn-of-the-century temple has been beautifully restored and the parish’s first public school, built primarily with contributions from German Jewish immigrant Julius Freyhan, is being resurrected as a community cultural center and the state’s first museum highlighting the significant contributions of the early Jewish immigrants whose business and financial acumen proved so vital to the post-bellum economic recovery of the South.

Angola Museum

In a region long famous for its lush antebellum gardens, a contemporary horticultural masterpiece serves to showcase the contributions of another group of immigrants, the Japanese-American family who brought the extensive gardens at Afton Villa Plantation back to life upon relocating to Louisiana after World War II. Today Imahara’s Botanical Garden rivals the early plantation plantings with thousands of plant specimens as well as a display of Haiku cypress carvings sharing the family legacy.


St. Francisville’s early settlers, those who carved the indigo and cotton plantations from the wilderness, certainly chose a propitious location for the little settlement right along the Mississippi River, so important as a means of transportation. Springtime overflow of its waters enriched the surrounding bottomlands and also provided, along this the only unleveed stretch of the lower Mississippi, the cyclical flooding that created the unique environment now preserved as Cat Island National Wildlife Refuge, home of the country’s largest bald cypress and other old-growth trees as well as habitat for an abundance of both migratory and resident birds and waterfowl.

Cat Island NWR

From St. Francisville northward, the rugged Tunica Hills area is an unspoiled wilderness that continues to support the same rich birdlife that so enthralled artist-naturalist John James Audubon in the 1820s that he painted dozens of his famous bird studies right in West Feliciana Parish. The steep wooded hillsides and deep cool hollows shelter rare plants and animals such as chipmunks found nowhere else in the state, and St. Francisville’s proximity to Clark Creek Natural Area make it an ideal jumping-off spot for hiking to a popular series of waterfalls.


If the early settlers chose St. Francisville’s location for its prime planting prospects, correctional officials chose the area just as carefully for its rugged terrain making escapes difficult from the maximum-security penitentiary called Angola, once the bloodiest prison in the country. Now its days of infamy are preserved in compelling exhibits in a museum which, along with the prison rodeo called the Wildest Show in the South, has helped make the 18,000-acre correctional facility the unlikeliest of tourist attractions.


Another special event unique to St. Francisville is the summertime Civil War re-enactment called The Day The War Stopped. Instead of the usual guns-blaring battle scene, this is actually a celebration of a rare moment of civility in the midst of a bloody war, when Masons from both Confederate and Union forces joined together in brotherhood to bury under flag of truce a Union naval officer in the oak-shaded cemetery of historic Grace Episcopal Church.

Temple Sinai

Louisiana is indeed a unique cultural destination where visitors have experiences available nowhere else. As Lt. Gov. Dardenne says, “When they come to Louisiana, they are going to leave with an experience unlike anything else. When you leave Louisiana, stories will be your best souvenir.” St. Francisville certainly has its share of special experiences and goodness knows there are plenty of stories. As the little town becomes a creative haven for writers, artists, musicians and others seeking quiet inspiration, other local events have been especially planned to enhance that experience and share it with visitors.


On Saturday, February 22, A Gathering of Writers and Readers, a symposium sponsored by Arts For All of author presentations, panel discussions and book signings, takes place at Hemingbough in St. Francisville. Moderated by SLU professor and writer Charles Elliott, the event features National Medal of Arts recipient Ernest Gaines as well as four professional authors chosen to give the audience a well-balanced appreciation for the art of literature—poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, nonfiction.

Day the War Stopped

Nationally acclaimed award-winning fiction author Dr. Wiley Cash, the Entergy Author for this event, earned his PhD at UL Lafayette, where he began the bestselling novel A Land More Kind than Home, called “great Gothic Southern fiction filled with whiskey, guns and snake-handling.” His just released second book promises to be just as riveting. Rheta Grimsley Johnson is a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist and author of nonfiction books including Poor Man’s Provence about time spent in the Atchafalaya Basin. Dr. Julie Kane, Northwestern State University professor and Louisiana’s past Poet Laureate, has published five volumes of poetry, and Anne Butler writes nonfiction books preserving Louisiana history and culture.

For online information visit artsforall.felicianalocal.com; to purchase tickets, brownpapertickets.com/event/491750.This program is supported in part by a grant from the Louisiana Division of the Arts, Office of Cultural Development, Department of CRT, in cooperation with the Louisiana State Arts Council, the Greater Baton Rouge Arts Council, and the National Endowment for the Arts.


Another literary event, planned for later in the year, will focus on the writings of the late Louisiana author Walker Percy and his cultural and family ties to the St. Francisville area.

Located on US Highway 61 on the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge, LA, and Natchez, MS, the St. Francisville area is a year-round tourist destination. A number of splendidly restored plantation homes are open for tours daily: the Cottage Plantation, the Myrtles Plantation, Greenwood Plantation, plus Catalpa Plantation by reservation; Afton Villa Gardens and Imahara’s Botanical Garden are open in season. Particularly important to tourism in the area are its two significant state historic sites, Rosedown Plantation and Oakley Plantation in the Audubon state site, which living-history demonstrations most weekends to allow visitors to experience 19th-century plantation life and customs (state budget constraints have unfortunately shuttered Oakley Sunday and Monday).


The nearby Tunica Hills region offers unmatched recreational activities in its unspoiled wilderness areas—hiking, biking, birding, photography, hunting. There are unique art galleries plus specialty and antiques shops, many in restored historic structures, and some nice restaurants throughout the St. Francisville area serving everything from ethnic cuisine to seafood and classic Louisiana favorites. For overnight stays, the area offers some of the state’s most popular Bed & Breakfasts, including historic plantations, lakeside clubhouses and beautiful townhouses right in the middle of St. Francisville’s extensive National Register-listed historic district, and there are also modern motel accommodations for large bus groups.

For visitor information, call St. Francisville Main Street at 225-635-3873 or West Feliciana Tourist Commission at 225-6330 or 225-635-4224; online visit www.stfrancisvillefestivals.com, www.stfrancisville.net or www.stfrancisville.us (the events calendar gives dates and information on special activities).

Hollywood in the Hills

St. Francisville: Hollywood in the Hills

By Anne Butler

As Louisiana has become the country’s third busiest state for movie and television production, just behind California and New York according to figures cited by writer Timothy Boone, so St. Francisville has become one of the film industry’s most popular locations. Hollywood, in other words, has discovered what residents have known for a long time: the St. Francisville area has something for everyone.
From the Mississippi River to the sandy creeks and unspoiled wilderness areas of the rugged Tunica Hills, from sand pits that look like desserts and deeply sunken roadbeds to architectural treasures like antebellum plantations and rude rustic cabins, from country lanes overhung with moss-draped trees and weathered barns to the quaint little rivertown of St. Francisville and even the state’s enormous maximum security penitentiary, location scouts excited about the area’s potential have directed a number of productions to West Feliciana in recent years---Jonah Hex, GI Joe II, Oblivion starring Tom Cruise and Morgan Freeman, Beautiful Creatures, Whiskey Bay, Maze Runner, Battle Los Angeles, Everybody’s All American, Dead Man Walking, Out Of Sight, North & South. Filming for The Reaping, with Hilary Swank, was interrupted by Hurricane Katrina.
For the just completed docudrama Bonnie and Clyde, a large number of locations in St.Francisville were used in the filming, including the courthouse, recently restored Temple Sinai for funeral scene, Magnolia Café, and Birdman Books and Coffee, plus other locales in the surrounding countryside. The town of St. Francisville was perfect for this production, according to tourist director Laurie Walsh, because “it steps back in time so naturally.” Cover the streets around the courthouse square with sand, bring in some vintage cars and actors in period costumes, and St. Francisville is transformed into an ideal 1930s setting, especially with still-used structures like the 3-V Tourist Courts, tiny overnight cabins with attached garages that were so typical of the era.
Productions like Bonnie and Clyde, so visible and accessible, involve the entire community, according to Walsh, and townsfolk are very supportive, with lots of locals experiencing the excitement of working as extras, not to mention the thrill of sharing a latte with the likes of William Hurt in the local coffeehouse. The exposure for St. Francisville and West Feliciana is great, Walsh explains, and the productions generate income for all segments of the community, not only for tourist services like accommodations and restaurants but also for cleaners (costumes often need cleaning), gas stations, hardware stores, locations for base camps, law enforcement agencies for providing extra security, crowd control and traffic diversions. Thanks to Walsh and an active local location scout, owners of properties used in filming are paid, often quite well.
In addition to serving as the Main Street Manager and Tourist Commission Director, Walsh is also the Film and Video Liaison for both town and parish, charged with overseeing film productions. A required no-fee permit includes practicalities like insurance indemnity and providing advance notification to local authorities on filming sites and shooting schedules, and Walsh very capably assists production crews locating whatever they need.
The town works closely with the Baton Rouge Film Commission, which has just launched a new website, www.filmbatonrouge.com, with St. Francisville area settings like Tunica Hills and Cat Island prominently displayed on the very first page of suggested filming locations. Additional information is available on St. Francisville town and tourist commission websites. According to figures from Louisiana Entertainment, statewide economic impact from the film industry in 2012 was $1.7 billion, generating 14,000 jobs, thanks in part to the state’s film tax credit program. With industry productions having such a huge impact on the state economy, St. Francisville is well positioned to take advantage of continuing interest in movie and television productions that can be enormously beneficial to the entire area.
But it’s not necessary to be a movie star to enjoy the area. Summertime special events in St. Francisville include the popular annual Feliciana Hummingbird Celebration, sponsored by the Feliciana Nature Society in this area where the artist Audubon found inspiration for many of his famous bird studies in the 1820s. It will be held Friday and Saturday, July 26 and 27. The Friday evening kick-off event begins at 6 p.m. at Rosedown State Historic Site, with a wine and cheese reception featuring LSU professor Catherine Fontenot speaking on hummingbirds and the plants that attract them to landscapes. Saturday the banding of birds by biologists Nancy Newfield and Linda Beale gives visitors the opportunity to observe the hummingbirds being captured, weighed and banded from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. at two locations, Murrell Butler’s home and artist’s studio at 9485 Oak Hill Road, and Carlyle Rogillio’s home at 15736 Tunica Trace. Online visit www.audubonbirdfest.com.
Also on Saturday, July 27, from 6 to 9 p.m. at Grace Episcopal Church’s Jackson Hall on Ferdinand Street in St. Francisville, the West Feliciana Animal Humane Society celebrates its first successful year of operations with a “Take a Chance on Me” Anniversary Gala, featuring food and drink, wine bar, live music by the popular local group Delta Drifters, fashion show and silent auction. Tickets of $25 benefit the WFAHS and the James L. “Bo” Bryant Animal Shelter, and they may be purchased in advance by mailing checks (payable to WFAHS) to Box 2032, St. Francisville, LA. For additional information online see http://wfahs.thebonnieblue.net. Thanks to the dedication of hardworking volunteers, this animal shelter has an incredibly high adoption rate; donations and volunteers are always welcome.
Located on US Highway 61 on the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge, LA, and Natchez, MS, the St. Francisville area is a year-round tourist destination.  A number of splendidly restored plantation homes are open for tours daily: the Cottage Plantation, Butler Greenwood Plantation, the Myrtles Plantation, Greenwood Plantation, plus Catalpa Plantation by reservation; Afton Villa Gardens and Imahara’s Botanical Garden are spectacular. Particularly important to tourism in the area are its two significant state historic sites, Rosedown Plantation and Oakley Plantation in the Audubon state site, which offer fascinating living-history demonstrations most weekends to allow visitors to experience 19^th-century plantation life and customs.
The nearby Tunica Hills region offers unmatched recreational activities in its unspoiled wilderness areas—hiking, biking, birding, photography, hunting. There are unique art galleries plus specialty and antiques shops, many in restored historic structures, and some fine little restaurants throughout the St. Francisville area serving everything from ethnic cuisine to seafood and classic Louisiana favorites. For overnight stays, the area offers some of the state’s most popular Bed & Breakfasts, including historic plantations, lakeside clubhouses and beautiful townhouses right in the middle of St. Francisville’s extensive National Register-listed historic district, and there are also modern motel accommodations for large bus groups.
For visitor information, call St. Francisville Main Street at 225-635-3873 or West Feliciana Tourist Commission at 225-6330 or 225-635-4224; online visit www.stfrancisvillefestivals.com, www.stfrancisville.net or www.stfrancisville.us (the events calendar gives dates and information on special activities, including the lively monthly third Saturday morning Community Market Day in Parker Park and the twice-weekend Farmers Markets on Thursdays and Saturdays).

St. Francisville Celebrates Spring with Audubon Pilgrimage

By Anne Butler

Evergreenzine

The forty-second annual Audubon Pilgrimage March 15, 16 and 17, 2013, celebrates a southern spring in St. Francisville, the glorious garden spot of Louisiana’s English Plantation Country. For over four decades the sponsoring West Feliciana Historical Society has thrown open the doors of significant historic structures to commemorate artist-naturalist John James Audubon’s stay as he painted a number of his famous bird folios and tutored young Eliza Pirrie of Oakley.

Features of the 2013 Audubon Pilgrimage include one historic townhouse (Evergreenzine) and three country plantations (Wakefield, Beechwood and Catalpa), plus Audubon (Oakley) and Rosedown State Historic Sites, Afton Villa Gardens, three 19th-century churches and the Rural Homestead with lively demonstrations of the rustic skills of daily pioneer life. Tour houses are open 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Wakefield Plantation

This year’s carefully selected features vividly illustrate how many early families were closely related by blood or marriage, thus intertwining their heritage and homes in the fascinating fabric of Feliciana history. Martha Barrow Turnbull of Rosedown Plantation had a daughter named Sarah who would marry the son of Oakley’s Eliza Pirrie, whose first husband was Martha’s brother and whose second husband was the Reverend William R. Bowman of Grace Church. Wakefield Plantation and Beechwood were both part of early settler Alexander Stirling’s immense landgrant holdings, and Stirling is buried in the Beechwood cemetery beside his wife Ann Alston, her sister Lucretia Alston Pirrie of Oakley, and Lucretia’s daughter Eliza Pirrie. Catalpa Plantation was the home of Willie Fort, who was so taken with Eliza’s beautiful Bowman granddaughters that he married not one but two of them.

All of these early plantations—Oakley whose three-storied double-galleried house whispers of West Indies influence, Rosedown and Wakefield with their grand 1830s Greek Revival structures, plus Catalpa and Beechwood with later but exceedingly pleasant Victorian cottages--were furnished with supplies from the drygoods mercantiles operated in St. Francisville mostly by industrious Jewish immigrants like the builder of the historic townhouse called Evergreenzine.

Beechwood Plantation

The National Register Historic District around Royal Street is filled during the day with the happy sounds of costumed children singing and dancing the Maypole; in the evening as candles flicker and fireflies flit among the ancient moss-draped live oaks, there is no place more inviting for a leisurely stroll. Friday evening entertainment features a play called “An Audubon Spring Sketch” with middle-school actors at 5:30 p.m. in Audubon Market Hall, old-time Hymn Singing at the United Methodist Church (6 to 7 p.m.), art exhibit at the recently restored Temple Sinai (6 to 9 p.m., and also open during the day Saturday and Sunday 9 to 5:30), dramatic Graveyard Tours at Grace Episcopal cemetery (6 to 9, last tour begins at 8:30 p.m.), and a wine and cheese reception at Bishop Jackson Hall (7 to 9:30 p.m.) featuring a casual style show of the pilgrimage’s exquisitely detailed 1820’s costumes, nationally recognized for their authenticity. The Audubon play will also be presented on Saturday at 10 and 2, and Sunday at 2 p.m. in Market Hall. Light Up The Night, the Saturday evening soiree, features live music and dancing, dinner and drinks beginning at 7 p.m.

Catalpa Plantation

For tickets and tour information, contact West Feliciana Historical Society, Box 338, St. Francisville, LA 70775; phone 225-635-6330 or 225-635-4224; online www.audubonpilgrimage.info, email sf@audubonpilgrimage.info. Tickets can be purchased at the Historical Society Museum on Ferdinand Street.

Throughout springtime, the gardens of St. Francisville are spectacular, with some of the state’s finest antebellum plantings showing what a felicitous climate, rich soil, horticultural know-how and unlimited labor could produce in the mid-1900s. Rosedown Plantation’s 27 acres of formal plantings of heirloom specimens and Afton Villa’s landscaped terraces and oak allee underplanted with Pride of Afton azaleas have recently been joined by a contemporary garden, Imahara’s Botanical, where one of the state’s outstanding horticulturists has created a blooming hillside oasis from an old cypress swamp and overgrown gullies (open weekends).

St. Francisville is a year-round tourist destination featuring a number of splendidly restored plantation homes open for tours daily: The Cottage Plantation, Butler Greenwood Plantation, The Myrtles Plantation, Greenwood Plantation, plus Catalpa Plantation by reservation. Afton Villa Gardens and Imahara’s Botanical Gardens are open seasonally. Particularly important to tourism in the area are its two significant state historic sites, Rosedown Plantation and Oakley Plantation in the Audubon state site, offering periodic fascinating living-history demonstrations so visitors can experience 19th-century plantation life and customs.

The nearby Tunica Hills offer unmatched recreational activities in unspoiled wilderness areas—hiking, biking, birding, photography, all especially enjoyable in the cool weather. There are unique art galleries plus specialty and antiques shops, many in restored historic structures, and some fine little restaurants throughout the St. Francisville area serving everything from ethnic cuisine to seafood and classic Louisiana favorites. For overnight stays, the area offers some of the state’s most popular Bed & Breakfasts, including historic plantations, lakeside clubhouses and beautiful townhouses right in the middle of St. Francisville’s extensive National Register-listed historic district, and there are also modern motel accommodations for large bus groups.

For visitor information, call St. Francisville Main Street at 225-635-3873 or West Feliciana Tourist Commission at 225-635-4224; online visit www.stfrancisville.us or www.stfrancisvillefestivals.com (the events calendar gives dates and information on special activities like the twice-weekly farmers’ market).

A COUNTRY CHRISTMAS CELEBRATION

A COUNTRY CHRISTMAS CELEBRATION IN ST. FRANCISVILLE, LA,

November 30, December 1 and 2

By Anne Butler

St. Francisville’s economy was predominantly agriculture-based into the mid-20th century; the farmers planted sweet potatoes, the farmers’ wives canned the potatoes at the local processing plant, and prosperity proved elusive. But even then, visitors were drawn to the area by its nostalgic charm.

Grand Greek Revival Greenwood offered house tours and the setting for swashbuckling movies like Drango (1957) starring dashing Jeff Chandler. At gothic Afton Villa, Aunt Shug made pralines for the tourists and her husband in top hat and tails swept deep bows to entice passing carss in from two-lane Highway 61. Bewhiskered Jimmy Bowman and his spinster sisters offered peeks of the rundown but still glorious Rosedown Plantation house and overgrown gardens, timidly proffering penny postcards for sale. The Cottage opened the first B&B where would-be Scarlett O’Haras were served morning coffee on silver trays while snuggled in fine four-poster beds.

Alas, Greenwood and Afton Villa burned; the sweet potato cannery closed. The little town of St. Francisville seemed destined to fade away as well, until 1972 when the passionate preservationists of the recently formed historical society hit upon a plan to bring in tourists---and money---with the Audubon Pilgrimage, opening the doors to private historic homes and gardens one weekend each spring. The pilgrimage had as much to say to residents as it did to visitors, giving locals an increased appreciation of the natural beauty and historic treasures they too often took for granted. Is this history relevant today, the cultural antecedents that made the community what it is? As one rather earthy early New Orleans legislator commented, “If ya ain’t got culcha, ya ain’t got sh**!”

For forty years the popular pilgrimage proved St. Francisville indeed had “culcha,” but all the “culcha” in the world isn’t worth much if it isn’t economically sustainable, and this springtime tour lasted a mere three days a year and featured only historic properties. With changing demographics of tourism and year-round interest in visiting the area, it was only natural to augment the spring festival with what has become the region’s most popular small-town Christmas celebration, “Christmas in the Country,” featuring fabulous shopping opportunities and fun-filled family-friendly downtown activities, plus a library fundraising tour of outstanding contemporary houses as well.


Christmas in St. Francisville has always been a magical time. In the 19th century, country folks from miles around would pile into wagons to do their weekly shopping in the little town’s dry-goods emporiums that offered everything from buggies to coffins. At Christmas, tiny tots would press their noses against frosted storefront windows to gaze with wistful longing at elegant china dolls and wooden rocking horses.

It’s still that way today. Millions of tiny white lights trace soaring Victorian trimwork and grace gallery posts to transform the extensive downtown National Register Historic District into a veritable winter wonderland for Christmas in the Country November 30, December 1 and 2, as the historic little rivertown showcases its continuing vitality as the center of culture and commerce for the entire surrounding region. The enthusiastic sponsors of Christmas in the Country are the downtown merchants, and the real focus of the weekend remains the St. Francisville area's marvelous little shops, which go all out, hosting Open Houses with refreshments and entertainment for shoppers while offering spectacular seasonal decorations, great gift items, and extended hours. A variety of fine shops occupy historic structures throughout the downtown area and spread into the outlying district, each unique in its own way, and visitors should not miss a single one.


Beginning at 5:30 p.m. Friday, Nov. 30, Santa Claus comes to town to kick off the Lighting Ceremony of the Town Christmas Tree, followed by a public reception at Town Hall hosted by longtime St. Francisville Mayor Billy D'Aquilla and featuring performances by the First Baptist Church Children’s Choir and West Feliciana Middle School Choir. The Baton Rouge Symphony presents its annual concert of seasonal selections and dessert reception beginning at 7 p.m. at Hemingbough; tickets are available at the Bank of St. Francisville. And designated residences along Royal and Ferdinand Streets allow visitors to “Peep into our Holiday Homes” Friday and Saturday evenings from 6 to 8 p.m.

Saturday, Dec. 1, begins with a 7:30 a.m. Community Prayer Breakfast at United Methodist Church Fellowship Hall just off Royal St., followed by Breakfast with St. Nick for children at Jackson Hall next to Grace Church at 8 and 9:30 a.m., sponsored by the Women’s Service League (reservations recommended; www.womensserviceleague.com or 225-721-3563). The Women’s Service League also sells fresh wreaths and pre-wrapped Plantation Country Cookbooks all weekend on Ferdinand St. next to the library, with proceeds benefiting local civic and charitable activities.



Throughout the day Saturday there will be children’s activities and photos with Santa, the Main Street Band (noon to 2), handmade crafts and food vendors in oak-shaded Parker Park. There will also be entertainment in various locations throughout the downtown historic district, featuring choirs, dancers, musicians, and other performers.

The angelic voices of the Bains Lower Elementary children's choir—Voices in Motion-- are raised at the West Feliciana Historical Society Museum on Ferdinand St. at 10 a.m. From 9:30 to 10:30 the West Feliciana High School Performance Choir sings at the United Methodist Church Fellowship Hall, followed from 11 to 11:45 by the school’s Beginning and Advanced Choirs. At 11:30 on Ferdinand St. the Westside Cloggers group put on a lively show at Bella Vita Salon, followed by a Shin Sun Korean Martial Arts demonstration. From 10 to 2 the Sweet Adelines’ Lyrical Quartet strolls and sings along Ferdinand and Royal Sts., while the Angola Inmate Traveling Band from Louisiana State Penitentiary performs across from Garden Symposium Park from noon to 4. Kevin Johnson sings on the front porch of Town Hall 11 to 1, and the Swinging Willows Jazz Band performs at the library from noon to 1. Arts for All hosts a photography exhibit at its studio in the Quarters on Commerce St. 10 to 5.

Saturday’s highlight, of course, is the colorful 2 p.m. Christmas parade sponsored by the Women’s Service League, this year’s theme being “Joy to the World.” Dozens of gaily decorated parade floats vie for coveted prizes, accompanied by cheerleaders, bands, bagpipes, vintage cars, marching ROTC units and dancers. Santa rides resplendent in a magnificent sleigh pulled by Louisiana State Penitentiary's immense prized Percheron draft horses, groomed and gleaming in the sunlight with their sleigh bells jingling. Grand marshall is dedicated town employee Eric Schneider, who spreads his own joy on his daily rounds maintaining St. Francisville’s remarkably litter-free streets.

At 6 p.m. on Saturday, the United Methodist Church on Royal St. hosts a Community Sing-a-long, while the First Baptist Church on US 61 at LA 10 sponsors its very popular Live Nativity from 6 to 8 p.m., reminding of the reason for the season. In addition, Saturday evening from 6 to 8, visitors are welcomed for candlelight tours, period music and wassail at Audubon State Historic Site on LA Hwy. 965, where artist-naturalist John James Audubon painted many of his famous bird studies in the early 1820's. This historic home never looks lovelier than in the soft romantic glow of the candles that were its only illumination for its early years. During the day from 10 to 4, the historic site observes its annual holiday festival.


Christmas in the Country activities continue on Sunday, December 2, with in-town activities and, north of St. Francisville in the Lake Rosemound/Laurel Hill area, the Friends of the Library Tour of Homes, featuring six unique homes on four private properties, with refreshments provided by Heirloom Cuisine. Tickets are available from the West Feliciana Parish Library, at the featured homes and other businesses on the day of the tour (for information, 225-635-3364). Features include the Figges’ lakeside country retreat on Hazelwood Plantation, a cottage called Kwamalusi (Zulu for “place of the shepherd”) housing retired bishop Charles Jenkins and his wife, Paul and Mary Ann Stevens’ Micajah Lodge which began life as a log cabin, and several incredible cypress-and-glass structures surrounded by lakes and waterfalls and gardens owned by the Roland family.

St. Francisville is a year-round tourist destination featuring a number of splendidly restored plantation homes open for tours daily: The Cottage Plantation, Butler Greenwood Plantation, The Myrtles Plantation, Greenwood Plantation, plus Catalpa Plantation by reservation. Afton Villa Gardens and Imahara’s Botanical Gardens are open seasonally. Particularly important to tourism in the area are its two significant state historic sites, Rosedown Plantation and Oakley Plantation in the Audubon state site, offering periodic fascinating living-history demonstrations so visitors can experience 19th-century plantation life and customs.


The nearby Tunica Hills offer unmatched recreational activities in unspoiled wilderness areas—hiking, biking, birding, photography, all especially enjoyable in the cool weather. There are unique art galleries plus specialty and antiques shops, many in restored historic structures, and some fine little restaurants throughout the St. Francisville area serving everything from Chinese and Mexican cuisine to seafood and classic Louisiana favorites. For overnight stays, the area offers some of the state’s most popular Bed & Breakfasts, including historic plantations, lakeside clubhouses and beautiful townhouses right in the middle of St. Francisville’s extensive National Register-listed historic district, and there are also modern motel accommodations for large bus groups.

For visitor information, call St. Francisville Main Street at 225-635-3873 or West Feliciana Tourist Commission at 225-635-4224; online visit www.stfrancisville.us (the events calendar gives dates and information on special activities) or www.stfrancisvillefestivals.com.