Just up the Mississippi River from Baton Rouge is a little Louisiana town that barely fits on the map. “Two miles long and two yards wide,” as the description goes, St. Francisville was developed on a narrow ridge overlooking the river and today hosts a population of less than 2,000 people. But in the early nineteenth century, this small city of big surprises was the booming commercial and cultural center of the entire surrounding plantation country, and below her bluffs operated the largest shipping port between the Gulf of Mexico and Memphis, Tennessee.
St. Francisville
Officially established in 1809, six years after the Louisiana Purchase was negotiated, St. Francisville was at first claimed by the Spanish, who believed the town lay on the Florida side of the Louisiana Purchase boundary. But the following year the inhabitants of what are now known as the “Florida Parishes,” along with others from lower Mississippi and Alabama, rebelled against the Spanish government. Making St. Francisville their capital city, the Southern planters declared themselves a free and independent nation, and the Republic of West Florida was born. The Republic lasted seventy-four glorious days before the United States annexed St. Francisville and the neighboring parishes to the rest of Louisiana.
A number of both antebellum and post-Civil War structures survive to this day, making St. Francisville not only a popular tourist destination in the South but a rich and delightful place to live. A number of plantation homes and historic gardens dating from the late 1700’s and early 1800’s, some owned by descendants of original settlers, still stand in all their regal glory.
Rosedown Plantation – Built in 1835, Rosedown was named for a play that owners Daniel and Martha Turnbull saw on their honeymoon. Today, it is a National Historic Landmark and is run by the Office of State Parks. It was listed on the national register in 2001. Photo courtesy of Main Street St. Francisville and the West Feliciana Parish Tourist Commission.
A good example is the Rosedown Plantation. Daniel Turnbull, whose parents had risen above the fold in cotton, bought 3, 455 acres over a twenty-year period in the early 1800’s, planted most of it in cotton, and became one of the wealthiest men in the nation. After the construction of their magnificent house at Rosedown in 1835, Daniel and his wife Martha turned their attention to establishing the gardens, which eventually covered twenty-eight acres. Patterned after gardens the couple had seen in Italy and France, the grounds at Rosedown presented the finest of the few privately-maintained formal gardens in nineteenth-century America. The home and gardens have been restored to their original beauty and are open to the public today.
Equally enchanting are the Afton Villa Gardens, owned and developed by Martha’s family, the Barrows, during the same period. David Barrows bought the “home place” from his father in 1839, later renaming it Afton Villa. Despite the comforts of land and money, sorrow often visited the Barrow home: several children died from sickness, and Sally, his wife of twenty-three years, died in childbirth in 1846. A year later, Barrows married the beautiful and stylish Susan Woolfolk of Kentucky, who brought to Afton Villa a taste for grand-scale living. Barrows gave his new wife free rein to build up the house using the original as a base and to establish gardens according to her imagination. The result was the most majestic home and gardens of their time. The forty-room Gothic Revival house burned in 1963, but the twenty-five–acre menagerie of gardens has been restored and continues to delight visitors from around the world.
St. Francisville Inn
Plantation life in and around St. Francisville, of course, was never quite the same following the great War of the 1860’s, but a great number of Jewish immigrants fleeing religious persecution in Germany settled in the area, providing through their merchandising and financial expertise the credit and financing necessary for planters and the entire cotton industry to stay afloat. Usually penniless when they arrived, the Jewish settlers over time became financially successful through their tireless industry and wise business dealings and made significant contributions to the community. The beautiful Wolf-Schlessinger house, now the St. Francisville Bed and Breakfast, demonstrates the Jewish citizens’ prosperity; the Julius Freyhan High School, the first public school building in the parish, stands as a memorial to their generosity and philanthropy.
St. Francisville, Louisiana, is a genuine ruby of the South, still active and thriving and preeminent among those communities seeking to restore and preserve the memory of not only antebellum plantation life in its golden era but the beauties of Southern heritage since. From the Spanish moss hanging from over-two-hundred-year-old oaks to the mixture of French, Spanish, and English architecture and landscape design, the little “Villa de San Francisco,” hugging its narrow ridge above the Mississippi, holds far more than its fair share of Southern delights.
