PHOENIX GREENWOOD PLANTATION—ST. FRANCISVILLE, LA,

by Anne Butler

Greenwood Burning It was a dark and stormy night. Really, it was. When lightning struck the uppermost corner of glorious Greek Revival Greenwood Plantation near St. Francisville on the night of August 1, 1960, the first awareness of the impending tragedy came from a glimpse of the glow of flames in the reflecting pond. And by the time help arrived, the fire had lit up the night so brilliantly, according to one eyewitness, that it was possible to read a book in the glare. Laurie Fisher, 15 at the time, lived just across the road from Greenwood. He vividly remembers that a rare and violent cool front passed through that evening, with the worst lightning he’d ever seen in his life. “Lightning struck all over that Greenwood hill,” he recalls. He had been clipping pastures, but hurriedly drove in from the field, turned on a heater and pulled his big 12-pound cat onto his lap to warm up. Laurie Fisher 50yrs later. Laurie’s aunt and uncle, Naomi F. and Frank Percy, had purchased Greenwood in the early 1900s from the Reed family, restoring the magnificent home and sharing it with the public for tours, magazine features, even as a setting for movies like Drango. The house was called the finest example of Greek Revival architecture in the South, nearly 100 feet square and completely surrounded by 28 Doric columns of slave-made brick supporting a solid copper roof topped by a belvedere from which the Mississippi River was visible. The evening of August 1, the elderly Percys were enjoying a visit from a young grandson, Jimmy Lathrop. He would be the first to spot the reflection of the flames in the pond and sound the alarm. Headlines Local Newspaper Greenwood Today Word spread quickly. By the time the old two-ton 1953 Chevy firetruck lumbered out from St. Francisville, neighbors and relatives had rushed over to help salvage what furnishings they could. Crowds of spectators clogged the narrow country lanes, and the ground was so rain-soaked that the heavy firetruck quickly got stuck. Laurie was sent home to unhook the cutter from his tractor so he could pull the firetruck out of the pond. The heat from the flames, he recalls, was so intense that the firefighters faced an impossible task, with the hollow cypress walls acting like flues to accelerate the destruction. By morning, there was nothing left of Greenwood but the brick columns and several forlorn chimneys stark against the sky. Laurie says the embers from the fire stayed hot for 10 whole days. “We never felt the world was the same after such an enormous tragedy,” he says today, his voice still tinged with sadness. Only the Columns Remained after the 1960 Fire Little did he know that Greenwood would rise from the ashes like the phoenix to become one of the St. Francisville area’s most appealing tourist destinations once again. After languishing untouched (but never unloved) for nearly a decade, the romantic beauty of the ruins resonated with the late Baton Rouge attorney Walton Barnes and his son, Richard. They purchased the house site and 300 surrounding acres in 1968, determined to return Greenwood to its antebellum glory days, when builder William Ruffin Barrow engaged prominent architect James Coulter to build a fine home on family property that would eventually grow to 12,000 acres for the cultivation of first cotton and then sugarcane. Guided by vintage films and photographs, tattered magazine features and fading family recollections, the Barnes spent some 20 years reconstructing the home as close as possible to the original. Today it once again welcomes visitors for tours, overnight stays in a detached B&B structure across the reflecting pond, corporate workshops and functions, beautiful weddings and social events. Hollywood has returned as well, with such films as Louisiana, both parts of North and South, and Sister, Sister using Greenwood as a setting for memorable scenes. Costumed Hostesses Greenwood is but one of six plantations making the St. Francisville area (on US Highway 61 between Baton Rouge and Natchez) a year-round tourist destination. Besides Greenwood, Rosedown and Audubon State Historic Sites, Butler Greenwood, The Cottage and The Myrtles—are open for daily tours, and Afton Villa Gardens opens seasonally. There are unique little shops in restored historic structures, and reasonably priced meals are available in a nice array of restaurants in St. Francisville. Some of the state's most unique Bed and Breakfasts offer overnight accommodations ranging from golf clubs and lakeside resorts to historic townhouses and country plantations; modern motel facilities can accommodate busloads. The scenic unspoiled Tunica Hills region surrounding St. Francisville offers excellent biking, hiking, birding, horseback riding and other recreational activities. The month of May is filled with special events, from a Memorial Day weekend cycling classic to a simple garden stroll, from community market day in the park to nature walks and living history demonstrations at state historic sites, and even a performance by the Baton Rouge Symphony (check the events calendar on the West Feliciana Tourist Commission website at www.stfrancisville.us). This is also the site for online coverage of tourist facilities and attractions in the St. Francisville area; see www.stfrancisville.us or www.stfrancisvilleovernight.com, or telephone (225) 635-3873 or 635-4224.

The Cottage Plantation one of Feliciana’s earliest

The Cottage Plantation one of Feliciana’s earliest

By Anne Butler
         

Its name hints at a rustic simplicity, and indeed this early plantation house was constructed long before the popularity of southern Greek Revival grandeur or Victorian flamboyance. Today one of six historic plantations that draw tourists to the St. Francisville area, The Cottage exhibits instead a sensible sturdiness, and for nearly 150 years it housed the sensible sturdy members of a single family.

In late 1810 or early 1811, shortly after the West Florida Rebellion ousted the Spanish in the area, Judge Thomas Butler purchased lands along Alexander’s Creek granted in the mid-1790s by Baron de Carondelet to John Allen and Patrick Holland. Named by Governor William C.C. Claiborne the first judge of the Feliciana parishes in 1812 after Louisiana became a state, Judge Butler was elected in 1818 to represent the area in the United State Congress, though he found in Washington “nothing like the agreeable social society we have in Louisiana.”

He came from a long line of distinguished military heroes descended from the Irish Dukes of Ormond. His father and four uncles, several under age 17 at war’s onset, fought valiantly on the American side in the Revolutionary War, gaining high rank and a toast from George Washington, with whom they endured the harsh winter of 1777-8 at Valley Forge. General Lafayette also commended the brothers’ bravery, saying, “When I wish a thing well done, I have a Butler do it.”

These brothers also fought in the subsequent Indian Wars, during which Major General Richard Butler, second in command of the US Army, was mortally wounded, tomahawked, scalped, and his heart was eaten by the redskins, while Col. Thomas Butler, father of the judge, was shot through both legs but was saved by a third brother. This same Col. Butler later gained notoriety for stubbornly resisting the famous “roundhead order” issued by General Wilkinson forbidding the wearing of a “queue,” the long pigtail favored by Anglo aristocracy and colonial army officers. After much anguished correspondence with his dear friend Andrew Jackson, the colonel was still under order of courtmartial for resisting what he considered an “arbitrary infraction of his natural rights” when he perished of yellow fever in 1805 in New Orleans, and it was said a hole was cut in the bottom of his coffin so that his queue might hang out in defiance.

Col. Thomas Butler had six children, the oldest being his namesake, born in 1785. Judge Thomas Butler, descending south from Pennsylvania, in 1810 was commissioned a captain in the cavalry of the Militia of the Mississippi Territory, purchased The Cottage soon afterward, and married Ann Madeline Ellis of Natchez in 1813. Together they had a dozen children, expanding the simple early cottage structure to accommodate them, and the judge’s letters to his beloved wife during absences on court duties or in Congress often begged her to “kiss my dear sweet children for me and make them often think of me.” Well educated and well travelled, the family maintained a cultured lifestyle as Judge Butler increased his landholdings to include several sugar plantations in Terrebonne Parish.
The children married into other distinguished plantations families---the Stirlings, the Minors, the Forts, even the family of Andrew and Rachel Jackson. The sons and cousins fought at the Battle of New Orleans with General Jackson, who made an extended visit to The Cottage on his way back to Tennessee, for Judge Butler’s brother was the general’s chief of staff.

The family military prowess continued during the Civil War. Judge Butler’s son Robert Ormond Butler, a Yale-educated physician born in 1832 who studied medicine in Paris, served as Surgeon in Chief under Confederate Brig. Gen. Pratt. He referred in correspondence to the Union troops as “villainous vandals,” describing a heartbreaking midnight march down the Mississippi River below Baton Rouge as “one continued scene of desolation and sadness, nearly every place plundered even to the huts of the poorest creoles, large plantations deserted not a living thing to be seen, the river once so teeming with life and gladness flowing by us as swiftly and silently as that stream said to flow to eternity.”

Dr. Butler’s children and grandchildren were the last generations of Butlers to occupy The Cottage. His daughter Louise, who never married, was a writer and historian of some note, whose published pieces in early Louisiana Historical Quarterlies captured the very soul of southern plantation life in the nineteenth century. When The Cottage was sold by the Butler family in the 1950s, an effort was made to preserve other vivid images of life in the early days through the donation of priceless vintage books to the LSU Library, significant correspondence and records to the Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collection at LSU, and an incredible collection of early 19th-c. garments to the university’s Textile & Costume Museum. Even portions of the once-extensive gardens surrounding The Cottage were shared, with one enormous white azalea more than 100 feet in circumference shipped by railroad flatcar to Houston.

Today The Cottage, long and rambling, peacefully presides with unpretentious charm atop a bluff overlooking Alexander’s Creek, the multitude of French doors opening from the long front gallery admitting cooling breezes and the huge live oaks providing plenty of shade. To the rear, one of the state’s most extensive and fascinating groupings of original plantation dependencies--the judge’s office/schoolroom, smokehouse, saddle room, commissary, kitchen/laundry, dairy and well house, greenhouses, carriage house with Judge Butler’s Philadelphia-made 1820 carriage, slave quarters used in filming The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, brick-walled family cemetery--collectively provide a clear picture of life on functioning plantation communities of the early 19th century.
Now occupied by Harvey and Mary Brown, its present-day economic viability stems from tourism, and visiting writers wax eloquent about The Cottage as a state of mind, its antebellum ambience evoking the serenity of a bygone era. When The Cottage was purchased in the fifties by Harvey’s uncle J.E. and Eudora Brown of Chicago, a number of improvements were effected, including an inside kitchen, swimming pool, and raised automobile bridge over the creek to replace a scary hanging footbridge and low-water ford. Mr. Brown was an innovative inventor and pioneer in the television industry, but both he and his wife threw themselves wholeheartedly into community preservation efforts by opening The Cottage for tours and Bed & Breakfast in rooms with fine four-poster beds and morning demitasse served on a silver tray before guests are called to a hearty plantation breakfast in the antique-filled dining room. The Cottage was the first B&B to open in the St. Francisville area, and remains one of the most popular.

With six plantations—Rosedown and Audubon State Historic Sites, Butler Greenwood, The Cottage, The Myrtles and Greenwood--open for daily tours, and Afton Villa Gardens open seasonally, the St. Francisville area (located on US Highway 61 between Baton Rouge, LA, and Natchez, MS) is a year-round tourist destination. There are unique little shops in restored historic structures, and reasonably priced meals are available in a nice array of restaurants in St. Francisville. Some of the state's most unique Bed and Breakfasts offer overnight accommodations ranging from golf clubs and lakeside resorts to historic townhouses and country plantations; modern motel facilities can accommodate busloads. The scenic unspoiled Tunica Hills region surrounding St. Francisville offers excellent biking, hiking, birding, horseback riding and other recreational activities. For online coverage of tourist facilities, attractions and events in the St. Francisville area, see www.stfrancisville.us or www.stfrancisvilleovernight.com, or telephone (225) 635-3873 or 635-4224.

Butler Greenwood - Audubon Pilgrimage

BUTLER GREENWOOD PLANTATION ONE OF FEATURES ON ANNUAL AUDUBON PILGRIMAGE IN ST. FRANCISVILLE, LA

By Anne Butler



Samuel Flower was one of the earliest English settlers in the St. Francisville area, a Quaker physician who emigrated from Pennsylvania in the 1770’s when the area was British territory; later, when Spain gained control, he treated Governor Manuel Gayoso. When Dr. Flower died in 1813, his eight heirs would divide thousands of arpents of land in the Felicianas, Rapides Parish, along Bayou Manchac, and in the Mississippi Territory. The family residence bordering Bayou Sara, appraised in the estate division at $12,300, was left to Dr. Flower’s 20-year-old married daughter Harriett. Now known as Butler Greenwood Plantation, the property is still owned and occupied by direct descendants of the original family and will be one of the featured tour homes on the Audubon Pilgrimage March 19, 20 and 21, 2010, as the West Feliciana Historical Society opens the doors to antebellum mansions and glorious gardens in celebration of artist John James Audubon’s stay in the parish in 1821.



This 39th annual pilgrimage, the major fundraiser supporting society preservation projects, also marks the bicentennial celebration of the West Florida Republic, whereby the Anglo-American settlers wrested the area from Spanish control to belatedly join the United States in the winter of 1810. Harriett Flower’s husband, Judge George Mathews, was a superior court judge in the Mississippi Territory and then the Territory of Orleans, appointed by President Jefferson, and would become the chief justice of the Louisiana State Supreme Court once Louisiana became a state in 1812. His father, General George Mathews, was a Revolutionary War hero who survived being bayoneted nine times to become a US Congressman and governor of Georgia, and during the international political wrangling over just where the eastern boundary of the Louisiana Purchase might be, he was sent by President Madison to Mobile and St. Augustine to keep an eye on the situation and maybe even foment a rebellion there in hopes of annexing to the United States all of East Florida as well as West.



Harriett and George Mathews lived at Butler Greenwood and raised indigo, cotton, sugarcane and corn, shipping the crops from their own dock on Bayou Sara and extending their landholdings to include a productive sugar plantation in Lafourche Parish that, according to Lewis Gray’s figures, placed them among the top 9% of sugar planters in the state in the 1850’s. After the death of Judge Mathews in 1836, his widow continued to run the plantations with help from her son Charles.



In the census of 1860, both Harriett and her son list their occupations as “planter,” their household including Charles’ wife Penelope Stewart, their children, an Austrian music teacher and an Irish gardener, with 96 slaves living in 18 dwellings and their personal estate valued at $260,000. In that year the 1400 acres of Butler Greenwood Plantation produced 130 bales of cotton, 2000 bushels of corn, 175 hogsheads of sugar and more than 10,000 gallons of molasses. Their other plantations covered nearly 10,000 acres worked by some 400 slaves and were equally productive in 1860, although after the Civil War the labor force had fallen to a field gang of only 27 freedmen working for monthly wages on the home place.



Now the home of the seventh and eighth generation of the family, Butler Greenwood is a simple, raised cottage-style plantation home filled with family treasures—oil portraits, Brussels carpet, gilded pier mirrors, Mallard poster beds, fine china and silverware, a French Pleyel grand piano, and the area’s finest original Victorian formal parlor, its twelve matching pieces still in the original upholstery. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places since 1979, the house is surrounded by extensive groves of live oaks and formal gardens filled with ancient camellias and sasanquas, sweet olive and magnolia fuscata grown to immense size. The original detached brick kitchen dates from the 1790’s, the finely trimmed garden gazebo from the 1850’s.



Other features of the 2010 Audubon Pilgrimage include historic townhouses (the recently beautifully reclaimed Cabildo and the Barrow House), Laurel Hill Plantation which has also been recently restored, glorious Afton Villa Gardens, Rosedown and Audubon State Historic Sites, three 19th-century churches as well as the Rural Homestead with its lively demonstrations of the rustic skills of daily pioneer life. Tour hostesses are clad in the exquisitely detailed costumes of the 1820’s, nationally recognized for their authenticity.



The National Register-listed historic district around Royal Street is filled during the day with costumed children playing nostalgic games 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, lingering stroll. Friday evening features old-time Hymn Signing at the United Methodist Church, Graveyard Tours raising the dead to tell their stories at Grace Episcopal Church cemetery, and a wine and cheese reception at the West Feliciana Historical Society museum/pilgrimage headquarters. Saturday evening features dinner al fresco and dancing to live music. For tickets and tour information, contact the West Feliciana Historical Society, P.O. Box 338, St. Francisville, LA 70775; telephone 225-635-6330; online www.audubonpilgrimage.info, email sf@audubonpilgrimage.info.



With six plantations—Rosedown and Audubon State Historic Sites, Butler Greenwood, The Cottage, The Myrtles and Greenwood--open for daily tours, and Afton Villa Gardens open seasonally, the St. Francisville area (located on US Highway 61 between Baton Rouge, LA, and Natchez, MS) is a year-round tourist destination, but visitors find it especially enjoyable in the early spring when the glorious 19th-century gardens are filled with both camellias and azaleas. There are unique little shops in restored historic structures, and reasonably priced meals are available in a nice array of restaurants in St. Francisville. Some of the state's most unique Bed and Breakfasts offer overnight accommodations ranging from golf clubs and lakeside resorts to historic townhouses and country plantations; modern motel facilities can accommodate busloads. The scenic unspoiled Tunica Hills region surrounding St. Francisville offers excellent biking, hiking, birding, horseback riding and other recreational activities. For online coverage of tourist facilities, attractions and events in the St. Francisville area, see www.stfrancisville.us or www.stfrancisvilleovernight.com, or telephone (225) 635-3873 or 635-4224.