Happening in St. Francisville, Louisiana

St. Francisville Says Goodbye and Good Riddance to 2020, Welcome to 2021

noreply@blogger.com (Blue Goose Media) — Wed, 23 Dec 2020 02:21:00 +0000

St. Francisville Says Goodbye and Good Riddance to 2020, Welcome to 2021
By Anne Butler

While we grieve for loved ones lost and celebrate those medical personnel and essential workers who have helped us preserve some semblance of living, we must remember that over the ages civilizations have somehow managed to survive pandemics and other atrocities. As Ashley Sexton Gordon reminded us in In Register magazine’s December issue, in the year 1347 the bubonic plague wiped out some 60% of Europeans, leading Italian writer Boccaccio to mourn that victims “ate lunch with their friends and dinner with their ancestors.” At least, she points out, they didn’t eat their friends, as did guide Alferd Packer, lost in a snowstorm in the San Juan Mountains of southwest Colorado in 1874, when he apparently cannibalized the five goldseekers in his starving party. And Smiley Anders’ contributor Marvin Borgmeyer brought up the Middle Ages, when survivors celebrated the end of each pandemic with wine and orgies (“Does anyone know what is planned when this one ends?” he asks).

As the new year opens, with vaccines and continued mitigation measures revealing the light at the end of the terrible tunnel, St. Francisville has much to celebrate and look forward to, for 2021 marks the 200th anniversary of the artist John James Audubon’s inspirational stay in the area. Hired by Lucretia Pirrie, mistress of Oakley Plantation, to tutor her young daughter Eliza for the summer, Audubon arrived at the Mississippi River port of Bayou Sara by steamboat in June of 1821. His arrival marked a pivotal point in his career. The artist who was “bereft at that time of not only funds but incentive” was about to be introduced to the rich flora and fauna of the Felicianas, teeming with birdlife, that would renew his enthusiasm and artistic inspiration to continue on his staggering quest to paint all the birds of this immense fledgling country..

The artist, penniless but rich in talent and dreams, was immediately struck by the beauty of the countryside, as he related in his journal: “The aspect of the country entirely new to us distracted my mind...the rich magnolia covered with its odoriferous blossoms, the holly, the beech, the tall yellow poplar, the hilly ground, even the red clay I looked at with amazement...surrounded once more by thousands of warblers and thrushes, I enjoyed nature.”

He recorded in his journal that the rich lushness of the landscape and flourishing birdlife “all excited my admiration,” and he would find the inspiration to paint dozens of his bird studies while residing at Oakley. The arrangement called for him to be paid $60 a month plus room and board for himself and his young assistant Mason, with half of each day free to collect and paint bird specimens from the surrounding woods, where he certainly must have cut a dashing figure in his long flowing locks, frilly shirts and satin breeches.

To celebrate the 200th anniversary of his arrival in the Felicianas, the West Feliciana Tourist Commission is planning an Audubon Interpretive Trail program, tracing his footsteps as he walked from Bayou Sara to Oakley Plantation, recording the amazing number of structures he would have seen and interacted with that are still standing in St. Francisville. These historic homes and businesses, governmental locations, churches and cemeteries have been preserved due to the area’s abiding sense of place, allowing visitors to experience at least partially what Audubon must have seen during his stay in 1821.

Of course there is nothing left of the little port city of Bayou Sara, washed away by continual Mississippi River flooding, but atop the bluffs of St. Francisville it is amazing how much is still around...the Catholic cemetery where Oakley’s neighbor rests in peace after Audubon had sat up with his body all night, the structures housing the mercantiles and marketplaces patronized by Audubon and his wife Lucy, the home of Audubon’s acquaintance whose horse he borrowed for a desperate ride to check on his wife Lucy during a yellow fever epidemic, the Episcopal church presided over by his pupil Eliza’s second husband, the sunken roadways and verdant countryside still teeming with birdlife, and of course Oakley Plantation, now a state historic site and popular tourist attraction with a wonderful visitor center full of all-inclusive exhibits bringing to life the early days on this extensive cotton plantation.

A 1937 biography by colorful Louisiana historian/author Stanley Clisby Arthur described Audubon’s aura of mysterious charm: “a gifted artist, quasi-naturalist, sometime dandy, quondam merchant, unkempt wanderer, many-sided human being...A halo of romance surrounds his entire career, and he was generally regarded as mad because of his strange self-absorption, his long hair, tattered garments, and persistence in chasing about the countryside after little birdies.” The good-looking and graceful young Audubon had a decided way with the ladies, played the flute as well as flageolet and violin, danced a mean cotillion, fenced, and was partial to snuff and a liberal helping of early-morning grog.

In 1820, following a string of failed business ventures, he set out for New Orleans aboard a flatboat with only his gun, flute, violin, bird books, portfolios of his own drawings, chalks, watercolors, drawing papers in a tin box, and a dog-eared journal. As he wrote in his journal, “Without any Money My Talents are to be My support and my Enthusiasm my Guide in My Difficulties.” He earned a meager living painting portraits and giving lessons in drawing, dancing and more scholastic subjects, but by the following year Audubon was established at Oakley Plantation near St. Francisville and well on his way to accomplishing his dream.

Audubon would spend only four months at Oakley, but managed to produce at least 32 of his bird paintings there and upwards of 70 in the area, from the Tunica Swamp to Little Bayou Sara, Beech Woods and Sleepy Hollow Woods, Beech Grove, and Thompson Creek. He did more of his bird studies in Louisiana than in any other state, and often referred to it as his favorite part of the country. He would mourn his departure from “the sweet Woods around us, to leave them was painfull, for in them We allways enjoyed Peace and the sweetest pleasures of admiring the greatest of the Creator in all his Unrivalled Works.”

In 1826 the artist started for Europe in search of a publisher; he had 240 bird drawings and $1700 his wife had saved from her earnings. He went first to England, then to Scotland with his “Birds of America,” and there the William H. Lizars Company of Edinburgh etched on copper plates the first ten drawings. After difficulties caused by colorists delaying production by going on strike in Scotland, Audubon took his drawings to the London company of Robert Havell and Son. It took eleven years to complete the copper plates of all, first run off in black and white, then hand colored to exactly match the original drawings, all under the supervision of Audubon. The original prints of “The Birds of America” measured 39½” by 29½” and were known as the Elephant Folio because of the size, bound in sets of four books; just under 200 complete bound sets were made up, sold by subscriptions costing $1000, and they represented 1065 lifesized birds. One of these original sets is in the rare book collection at LSU’s Hill Memorial Library.

Audubon died in January of 1851 in New York at the age of 66, some 30 years after his summer at Oakley set him on the road to recognition as one of the greatest bird artists and naturalists of all time, his bird studies characterized as “the greatest monument erected by art to nature.” As he would write in his journal on March 1, 1828, “The reason why my works pleased was because they are all exact copies of the works of God, who is the Great Architect and Perfect Artist—nature, indifferently copied, is far superior to the best idealities.”
And in the year 2021, the St. Francisville area will celebrate the colorful artist, his amazing bird studies, and hopefully the end of a devastating global pandemic. This might be a good year to give gift certificates from struggling small businesses in the St. Francisville area...the restaurants, overnight accommodations, gift shops and mercantiles, antiques co-ops, bookstores, art galleries, museums, historic tours, boutiques and all the other little indie businesses that have suffered from closures and limitations to keep customers safe.

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. Several splendidly restored plantation homes are open for tours: The Myrtles Plantation, Greenwood Plantation, plus Catalpa Plantation by reservation; Afton Villa Gardens is open in season. Particularly important to tourism in the area are its two significant state historic sites, Rosedown Plantation (a National Historic Landmark) 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.

The nearby Tunica Hills region offers unmatched recreational activities in its unspoiled wilderness areas—hiking, biking and bicycle racing due to the challenging terrain, birding, photography, hunting; note that Clark Creek Natural Area with its waterfalls just across the Mississippi state line will not reopen until spring, but other fine options for hiking include Cat Island National Wildlife Refuge, Mary Ann Brown Nature Preseve, and the West Feliciana Parish Sports Park. 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 in 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 225-635-3688 or West Feliciana Tourist Commission and West Feliciana Historical Society at 225-6330 or 225-635-4224; online www.stfrancisvillefestivals.com or www.stfrancisville.net.

Covid Christmas in St. Francisville:

noreply@blogger.com (Blue Goose Media) — Mon, 16 Nov 2020 23:03:00 +0000

Covid Christmas in St. Francisville:
Six Feet Y’all

By Anne Butler

For decades, St. Francisville’s wonderful Christmas in the Country celebration has drawn excited crowds to escape mall madness and celebrate a safe small-town holiday the first weekend in December. Its historic charm shone as tiny white lights climbed Victorian gallery posts to turn this little rivertown into a magical venue, its lavishly decorated shop windows filled with alluring gift possibilities and a delightful parade lending its theme to the whole shebang…Walking in a Winter Wonderland, or Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, or something equally upbeat.

Not this year. Pandemic issues have upended the whole celebration, but the resourceful sponsors have figured out innovative ways to ensure the safety of guests, even if it means unseating Santa from his comfy inside throne for outside photo ops with children and a special spaced-out parade marching to the theme of “Six Feet Y’all.”

Events kick off Friday evening, December 4, as retiring longtime mayor Billy D’Aquilla hosts his last lighting of the town Christmas tree at the St. Francisville town hall, complete with fireworks, the United Methodist Church Children’s Choir performing on the front porch (5:30) and a Welcome Walk-Thru. The First Baptist Church puts on a Drive-through Live Nativity at its location at the intersection of US 61 and LA 10 from 6:30 to 8 p.m. Private homes throughout the National Register-listed Historic District on Ferdinand and Royal Streets encourage peeping Toms to peer through windows to admire Christmas decorations inside; signs designate homes participating in what’s called “Peep into our Holiday Homes” on Friday and Saturday nights from 6:30 to 8.

Be sure to drive through the West Feliciana Parish Hospital’s lighting display from Burnett Road to Commerce St. and enjoy cookies and cocoa; this will be a popular drive-through all month. Also on Friday, from 7:30 to 9 p.m., Hemingbough hosts the Holiday Brass concert featuring the Baton Rouge Symphony.
Saturday, December 5, Anytime Fitness underscores its understanding that fitness bolsters both mental and physical health, especially in this time of Covid19, by sponsoring 5K and Fun Run races. Benefitting Cancer Services, Christmas on the Run begins at Town Hall on Ferdinand Street, 8 and 8:30 a.m. In downtown Parker Park, live music and interesting vendors will be onsite both Saturday and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.; over 50 unique artists and vendors sell woodworks, jewelry, bath products, paintings, food and much more.

Santa in the Park is the new outdoor event on Saturday, December 5, at 11 a.m. Featuring opportunities to take pictures with Santa in a fun socially distanced way, this event has been moved by the sponsoring non-profit Women’s Service League to the expansive West Feliciana Sports Park just off US Highway 61 at the north end of St. Francisville and will also feature the West Feliciana High band and cheerleaders plus theater students performing. Advance tickets are available online at www.wslwestfel.com or Facebook:WSLofWestFel; refunds will not be made if bad weather cancels this event. Bring your own picnic foods, lawn chairs or blankets.

There will be book signings for the new Soul of St. Francisville volume, full of fascinating history of iconic faces and places plus beautiful portraiture, at the West Feliciana Historical Society museum on Ferdinand Street on Saturday from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. and at The Conundrum bookstore Sunday from 11 to 1.

Saturday evening from 6 to 8 p.m., Audubon State Historic Site hosts its annual tribute to 1815 called A Jane Austin Christmas with wassail, straight-out-of-the-woods seasonal decorations, period music and vintage dancing by beautifully costumed re-enactors; Oakley House, where artist John James Audubon painted so many of his bird studies in 1821, never looks lovelier than by candlelight. A Community Sing-Along raises voices and spirits at the St. Francisville United Methodist Church on Royal Street from 6 to 7.

Sunday, December 6, the Women’s Service League is calling its ever-popular parade through downtown St. Francisville “Six Feet Y’all” in recognition of the Covid19 mandate for safe social distancing. Starting at 2 p.m., the parade features floats, marching groups and local politicians flinging lots of candy, with special adaptations in consideration of the peculiar circumstances required this year for the safety of parade participants and spectators. Live music will be presented in Parker Park before the parade, featuring the Fugitive Poets noon to 2 and Nancy Roppolo & Day Trip 2 to 4.

But the big draw this weekend is the wonderful array of shopping opportunities in St. Francisville. There are co-ops bursting at the seams with antiques and one-of-a-kind collectibles, plus art galleries, specialty boutiques, ladies’ fashions, home décor and gift shops, ice cream parlors and candy shoppes, a bookstore, candles and crafts, fine jewelers and more. Many of these are located in charming repurposed historic structures, some of which were private cottages and others carrying on the tradition of several centuries as mercantiles.

All of the shops are ramping up their appeal for Christmas in the Country, with exquisite seasonal decorations, refreshments, music, and lots of special sales. There’s also the fun “Find Me If You Can, I’m the Gingerbread Man” hunt with prizes; cards and directions are available at the West Feliciana Historical Society Museum and Visitor Center as well as the West Feliciana Parish Library, with Sunday noon at Town Hall turn-in card time. An additional incentive to Shop Small Y’All is the offer of a designer tote bag with purchase of $200 at each shop.

Located on US Highway 61 on the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge, LA, andNatchez, MS, the St. Francisville area is a year-round tourist destination. Several splendidly restored plantation homes are open for tours: The Myrtles Plantation, Greenwood Plantation, plus Catalpa Plantation by reservation; Afton Villa Gardens is open in season. Particularly important to tourism in the area are its two significant state historic sites, Rosedown Plantation (a National Historic Landmark) and Oakley Plantation in the Audubon state site, which offer periodic living-history demonstrations 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 and bicycle racing due to the challenging terrain, 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 in 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 225-635-3688 or West Feliciana Tourist Commission and West Feliciana Historical Society at 225-6330 or 225-635-4224; online www.stfrancisvillefestivals.comor www.stfrancisville.net.

St. Francisville: Soothing to the Soul

noreply@blogger.com (Blue Goose Media) — Thu, 15 Oct 2020 00:55:00 +0000

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St. Francisville: Soothing to the Soul

By Anne Butler, Images by Darrell Chitty

They come from every direction…from north or south along crowded US Highway 61, from the east via LA Highway 10, from the west across the new Audubon Bridge over the Mississippi River…and once they cross that parish line into West Feliciana, there is a collective audible sigh. Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhh!

What is it that makes St. Francisville and West Feliciana so soothing to the soul, a respite from the hustle and bustle of our hurried harried modern lifestyle? It is now, and always has been, a sanctuary, and not in the current politicized immigration sense. Somehow it has managed to strike the right balance between preservation and progress, preserving significant pieces of the past while providing modern-day comforts and services. Someone recalled that as children in pre-bridge days, when the ferry docked at the foot of the St. Francisville hill they pretended it was a time machine, because it was like going back in time, with the extended branches of the ancient live oaks welcoming as if into the arms of loving grandparents.

History, after all, is something to learn from and build upon; the lessons of the past---both good and bad---show us where we came from and where we have the potential to go. And so, amidst the wonderful array of carefully preserved historic homes and churches and scenic unspoiled wilderness areas, there are also modern medical facilities and libraries, top school system and a new inclusiveness that celebrates the cultural contributions of every level of society. The natural beauties of the landscape that so excited artist John James Audubon 200 years ago continue to inspire creative souls into the 21^st century, and joyful festivals and concerts show off the talents of today’s crop of artists, musicians, writers, crafters, chefs and other gifted residents.

A Facebook request drew insightful comments from a wide variety of St. Francisville lovers---those born and bred here who never left, whose bloodlines run as deep and strong as the roots of those majestic live oaks; those who couldn’t wait to leave, but found themselves inevitably drawn back home; and those who came to visit and simply never left. And there were three main themes as to why St. Francisville’s logo “We Love It Here” is so fitting. First, the rolling hills and deep hollows, the verdant pastoral reaches, the mighty river and bountiful blossoms in well-tended gardens with always the scent of sweet olive or some other old fragrance perfuming the air, the terrain unlike any other in flat swampy south Louisiana (as one said, when you live in the swamp, West Feliciana seems like mountains).

Second, the charm of St. Francisville’s streetscape with restored 19^th-century homes and churches, giving a sense of place, and yes, it’s a small town but in a good way, with a beautiful sense of grace that soothes the mind and soul, free of too much glitz and commercialism. And third and perhaps most important, the people, warm and welcoming with an unmatched sense of community and heritage and hospitality, where one can sit peacefully on the gallery and listen to the stories and watch the night fall as fireflies flit through the live oaks. Essentially, as one said, it’s a beautiful state of mind, where neighbors show care and concern, and the sky is full of stars and you can actually hear the night sounds. What it is, to most who live here, is home, a lasting tribute to the generations who have struggled to protect and honor and cherish its resources, residents and rich history.

Can this feeling be captured in a book? You bet it can, and it has, in the newly released book called The Soul of St. Francisville by two who earlier collaborated on the initial volume, Spirit of St. Francisville. Anne Butler is the author of more than twenty books, whose passion is the preservation of Louisiana history and culture, and who feels a real sense of urgency in getting all this preserved in one permanent volume. Award-winning artist Darrell Chitty is a real Renaissance man whose never-ending quest for new knowledge and techniques leads him into the future of art as well as into the past. This book is a showcase of his varied talents; some portraits you’d swear were Old Masters and some have been executed in the most modern of art forms. And yes, they both have discerning and loving eyes that certainly can see into the depths of the soul.

The Soul of St. Francisville will be introduced at Hemingbough on Thursday, November 19, from 5 to 7 p.m. for a book signing and portrait reveal. The text of the book contains fascinating in-depth history and the compelling images perfectly capture scenes of St. Francisville’s smalltown charm…morning coffee at the café before work, catching the schoolbus on Royal St., sharing woodsman’s skills and love of nature with grandchildren, all illuminated by a magical light filtering through the Spanish moss hanging from the ancient live oaks.

While many fall gatherings have been cancelled due to the pandemic, The Myrtles hosts the St. Francisville Food and Wine Festival on Sunday, November 15, featuring celebrated chefs, creative dishes, craft cocktails and fine wines as well as lawn games. Tickets may be obtained through bontempstix.com.

Located on US Highway 61 on the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge, LA, andNatchez, MS, the St. Francisville area is a year-round tourist destination; check locally for coronavirus mitigation requirements, please. Several splendidly restored plantation homes are open for tours: The Cottage Plantation (weekends), Myrtles Plantation, Greenwood Plantation, plus Catalpa Plantation by reservation; Afton Villa Gardens is open in season. Particularly important to tourism in the area are its two significant state historic sites, Rosedown Plantation (a National Historic Landmark) and Oakley Plantation in the Audubon state site, which offer periodic living-history demonstrations to allow visitors to experience 19^th-century life and customs.

The nearby Tunica Hills region offers unmatched recreational activities in its unspoiled wilderness areas—hiking, biking and bicycle racing due to the challenging terrain, birding, photography, hunting. While Clark Creek Nature Preserve remains closed to the public until after the first of the year, according to the Mississippi Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, there are wonderful hiking trails at the Mary Ann Brown Preserve and Audubon State Historic Site, at the West Feliciana Parish Sports Park, and also in the Cat Island National Wildlife Refuge (be sure to visit the Big Tree) and the Tunica Hills Wildlife Management Area that are open. 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 in 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 www.stfrancisville.us, www.stfrancisvillefestivals.com, or www.stfrancisville.net(the events calendar gives dates and information on special activities).

ADAPTIVE REUSE IN DOWNTOWN ST. FRANCISVILLE

noreply@blogger.com (Blue Goose Media) — Fri, 02 Oct 2020 02:03:00 +0000

ADAPTIVE REUSE IN DOWNTOWN ST. FRANCISVILLE

By Anne Butler

It’s hard to keep track of time in the midst of a pandemic, when many people no longer have rigid work or school schedules. The little town of St. Francisville feels much the same, with visitors not sure exactly what century they’re entering. Oh sure, there are no longer the blacksmith shops and gristmills, the cotton gins and livery stables, the bustling supply houses selling everything from buggies to coffins. But there are plenty of original structures, too, and even some that were moved up the hill from Bayou Sara to escape the river floodwaters.

The 19^th-century streetscape with its mixture of residential and commercial buildings side-by-side lends charm and assures a 24-hour presence in the historic district downtown. The desire to preserve these structures that give St. Francisville its sense of place has led to a need to creatively repurpose or adapt many of them for new purposes, to convert them for use in new formats. Repurposing is the reappropriation of artifacts or buildings of older cultures in new and creative ways, and this adaptive reuse can be seen throughout the two main streets of St. Francisville, Royal the residential area of beautiful historic homes, and Ferdinand the main thoroughfare to the Mississippi River and center of commerce.

In addition, there’s Commerce Street that was once the principal route from New Orleans to Natchez, where 19^th-century travelers were greeted at its intersection with Ferdinand St. (now the only traffic light in downtown St. Francisville) with the sight of three magnificent structures. They were just across the road from J. Freyhan & Co., sprawling commercial complex of general mercantiles, cotton gin, grocery, saloon, warehouses and more. These homes were built by Julius Freyhan himself, his brother-in-law Morris Wolf, and dentist Denison Stocking.

An 1880s Bayou Sara newspaper calledPastimes describes the picturesque beauty of these three residences at the fork of the road: “First, in order of completion, comes the cozy cottage of Mr. Julius Freyhan, the appearance of which attracts the attention as it is approached from either of the converging avenues of travel which mingle into one immediately in its front. The sensation produced is one of quiet, unostentatious comfort, the perfection of neatness unalloyed by any superfluity of ornamentation. Next comes the beautiful residence of our fellow townsman Mr. Morris Wolf, situated as it were like a jewel, between those of Mr. Freyhan on the one hand and Dr. D. Stocking on the other. There is a feeling of adaptedness about the relative position of these three buildings which is particularly strong. That of Mr. Wolf, though marked perhaps with more amplitude of architectural decoration, is a perfect mode of neatness and good taste. To the left as you approach stands the palatial dwelling of Dr. Stocking, a magnificent termination to the lovely and romantic scene presented by the ample lawn and towering trees which lie between it and the highway.”

Alas, the magnificent Stocking villa burned in the thirties, but descendants donated the grounds to the town of St. Francisville for a well-used public park complete with Victorian bandstand and space for fun festivals. On the other side, the original home of Julius Freyhan was passed to his brother-in-law Emmanuel Wolf, was used over the years as doctors’ offices, and was eventually torn down to make way for a convenience store which has morphed into a wonderful Middle Eastern restaurant. One side wing was salvaged to form the basis for first a real estate office and now a great shop brimful of home décor items and lots more, Sage Hill. And the center structure from the 19^th century, the one with that “amplitude of architectural decoration” and the only one left standing of this historic group, is now the recently restored St. Francisville Inn, beautifully furnished and landscaped, offering B&B accommodations, first-class restaurant and popular Saint bar.

Julius Freyhan, mid-1800s Jewish immigrant who arrived penniless and died one of the richest men in Louisiana, implemented a fine example of chain migration by bringing from Germany his nephew Morris Burgas, first as bookkeeper and then as owner of his own mercantile store. A succession of marriages kept this store operational in the same family for nearly a century, until it was appropriately resurrected as District Mercantile, selling everything under the sun…antiques and collectibles, oldtime children’s games and toys, clothing and more… from its propitious location right on Ferdinand St.

Throughout the downtown historic district, there are other examples of restorative repurposing. Built in 1905 and long used as the local bank, the wonderful red brick structure with its arched windows and entrance doorway is now home to the thriving international jewelry business called Grandmother’s Buttons, the original inspiration coming from the owner’s grandmother’s ubiquitous button box. Way Down South was a grocery store and auto dealership in its early years, and now it’s an appealing gift shop with popular ice cream bar and candy shoppe. Across Ferdinand Street is the West Feliciana Historical Society headquarters, museum and tourist information center, housed in an 1896 two-story frame structure that saw continuous use as a hardware store and blacksmithery until its restoration.

Grace Episcopal Church’s parish hall, Bishop Jackson Hall, was built in 1896 for the charitable brotherhood called the Knights of Pythias and was used for all sorts of travelling theatrics; on Royal Street, United Methodist Church’s offices are housed in what used to be a drugstore. Beautiful Temple Sinai, overlooking the river behind Grandmother’s Buttons, was built in the early 1900s, served as Jewish place of worship, then Presbyterian church, and has recently been restored by the Julius Freyhan Foundation as a wonderful nondenominational event center, ideal for concerts and small weddings. Another structure on Ferdinand Street was the Alamo Theater, screening popular movies in the mid-1900s; the locale was later used as a delicatessen and is now a well-stocked indie bookstore called The Conundrum. Throughout the downtown area, there are other examples, residences retrofitted as ladies’ dress shops, art galleries, beloved cafes and more.

One of the most interesting retrofits is ongoing, having begun life in Bayou Sara, was dismantled and moved up the hill safe from the floodwaters of the Mississippi River, and reassembled in what was called the Red Horse neighborhood (one story says because the horses that hauled the materials up the steep red-clay hill were covered in red dust). It served as the all-black Faithful Workers Lodge that was dedicated in 1929, then for years was known as the Boll Weevil Café with upstairs rooms of questionably scandalous usage. Restaurants came and went until its purchase by the current owner, who is doing a thorough restoration for a more wholesome mixed-use future, with apartments upstairs (eventually to be reached by elevator), and offices downstairs, plus an additional commercial space in the side lean-to. The rafters were salvaged and as much of the old wood used as possible, for ceilings especially. The original marble plaque, which graced the entrance and included the names of original members of the lodge, has been saved and will be replaced.

Venerable buildings can be expensive and labor-intensive to restore and repurpose, but there’s a certain charm about them that’s hard to replicate in new construction. A number of these and other historic buildings have benefitted from small but encouraging Main Street grants, now available on a competitive basis for restoration of interior and exterior projects involving commercial structures within certified Main Street communities. For information on the Main Street program, which is a National Trust effort to rehab deteriorating small towns across the country and return them to present-day viability and appeal, contact Director Laurie Walsh at 225-635-3688; online lauriemainst@bellsouth.net.

The nearby Tunica Hills region offers unmatched recreational activities in its unspoiled wilderness areas—hiking, biking and bicycle racing due to the challenging terrain, 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 in St. Francisville’s extensive National Register-listed historic district, and there are also modern motel accommodations for large bus groups.

St. Francisville’s Longtime Mayor Retiring After Half-Century of Public Service

noreply@blogger.com (Blue Goose Media) — Sun, 16 Aug 2020 01:39:00 +0000

Mayor D'Aquilla by D. Chitty

St. Francisville’s Longtime Mayor Retiring After Half-Century of Public Service
By Anne Butler

You wouldn’t think growing up in an isolated little community of a hundred or so occupants would be good training for a career in politics, but for St. Francisville’s longtime mayor it provided exactly what he needed as the basis for his half-century of public service…an appreciation for history and an ability to get along with everybody. Those two must have served him well, for he has been elected and re-elected since he moved to St. Francisville in 1959.

Mayor Billy D’Aquilla grew up in tiny Fort Adams, Mississippi, at a time when there were three wood-frame stores (two owned by his father and uncle) where trappers sold pelts and hunters or fishermen purchased provisions and all the country folks

from cotton plantations and small farms piled into wagons to come into town on Saturdays, sitting on the store porches and shooting the breeze. This was after the Mississippi River channel shifted away from town. Originally Fort Adams had been the important US port of entry before the acquisition of New Orleans. A Jesuit mission had been established there around 1700 to bring Christianity to the local Indians, and in 1798 a military post named for President John Adams was established overlooking the river near the international boundary established between Spanish West Florida and the Mississippi Territory. There was a steep one-mile road down to the port at Fort Adams where cotton from across the central part of the state was hauled for shipment on paddlewheelers to factors in New Orleans during much of the 19th century.

Working in his father’s store for $3 a day, Billy D’Aquilla recalls not having electricity until he was in the third grade, and listening to the Grand Old Opry on Tuesday nights after it had been broadcast on Saturday. When he left home at age 17 to join the National Guard, he’d already learned the skills he would put to use in the first job he got after moving to St. Francisville in 1959, working as a butcher in Vinci’s IGA supermarket and treating everybody the same…behind the counter, in front of the counter, and on the front porch shooting the breeze. After six years there, he opened his own grocery on US Highway 61, along with some rental houses behind the store, before advancing to travelling sales jobs.

Meantime he was elected to the town council in 1972 and served for twelve years, 8 of them as Mayor Pro Tem, before running for mayor himself. He winces as he recalls those early days of raw sewerage running in the streets of St. Francisville. Once elected to that demanding position in 1984, he has been returned to office ever since, 12 terms counting the town council, mostly without opposition. Why? He absolute loves his town and absolutely loves his job. He also serves on numerous boards and commissions like the Capitol Region Planning Commission and the Louisiana Municipal Association for which he has served for years as Vice President At Large for communities of 1,000 to 5,000 residents.

Proud of the many accomplishments made during his lengthy tenure, he says he has always had great people to work with, helping to implement many progressive improvements, including a new sewage system, 500,000-gallon water tower, new fire trucks, ball fields, enhanced tourism promotion. He’s especially proud of the downtown development plan that facilitated the placement of bricked sidewalks, public restrooms, and a lovely oak-shaded park with bandstand gazebo in the center of town, Parker Park, that hosts a myriad of festivals, marketplaces, and other entertainments. He has worked hard to get millions of dollars in grants to carry out projects in town, as well as lots of capital outlay money through the state legislature. He also convinced the state to turn over those portions of both highways (LA 10 and US 61) running through town, but only after the state overlaid both streets and shared $500,000 in surplus funding.

“We did a lot for the town,” he says, working with a top-notch Main Street program, historic district commission, planning and zoning commission and different boards to whom he gives a lot of credit, including the Zachary Taylor Parkway commission of which St. Francisville was a charter member, so influential in placement of the new Audubon Bridge across the Mississippi. “We used to have a Class Six fire rating, and improved it to a Class Three, quite an accomplishment with a small mostly volunteer department and a real savings on fire insurance costs. Next up is a new waste-water treatment plant, a $5 million project in a new location safe from the increasingly regular floods on the Mississippi River, to be financed by a half-cent sales tax that will be on the ballot in December.”

Tourism has for years been an economic mainstay for the downtown economy, with visitors coming from around the country to admire the small-town heritage and the preservation of its historic structures in a National Register-listed downtown district. As mayor, D’Aquilla certainly has been the head cheerleader and supportive of projects benefitting not only those within the town limits but also the parish as a whole. Steamboat visitors from around the world get off buses at the Town Hall and often stop in for a chat with the mayor, who is always welcoming. Hospitality as well as history keep this little town at or near the top of regional and national lists of Favorite Small Towns, and the patronage of out-of-town visitors means the difference between surviving and thriving for all the little downtown boutique shops and galleries. A spruced up docking facility planned for the steamboats that regularly visit St. Francisville will provide space for three vessels at once, as well as safe and spacious boat launching for recreational fishermen.

Age and back troubles have slowed the mayor, and he needs to spend more time with his family, especially wife Yolanda, whom he married in 1962. But as he approaches retirement, he looks back over his long career with the satisfaction of having made many improvements, with incredible help from his devoted staff and town employees. What is he most proud of? “I have always treated everybody fairly,” he says, “no matter what age, color or status in life. I think I am most proud of that.”

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; check locally for coronavirus mitigation requirements, please. Several splendidly restored plantation homes are open for tours: The Cottage Plantation (weekends), Myrtles Plantation, Greenwood Plantation, plus Catalpa Plantation by reservation; Afton Villa Gardens is open in season. Particularly important to tourism in the area are its two significant state historic sites, Rosedown Plantation (a National Historic Landmark) 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.

The nearby Tunica Hills region offers unmatched recreational activities in its unspoiled wilderness areas—hiking, biking and bicycle racing due to the challenging terrain, 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 in 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 www.stfrancisville.us, www.stfrancisvillefestivals.com, or www.stfrancisville.net (the events calendar gives dates and information on special activities).

St. Francisville offers sanctuary in time of COVID-19

noreply@blogger.com (Blue Goose Media) — Sat, 04 Jul 2020 00:06:00 +0000

St. Francisville offers sanctuary in time of COVID-19
By Anne Butler

“And into the forest I go, to lose my mind and find my soul.” That’s what 19th-century Scottish-born American naturalist John Muir said. Author and Sierra Club founder, Muir advocated the preservation of wilderness areas like Yosemite National Park, and his words certainly suit this unsettled and unpredictable time. Nature has such a calming, soothing impact on worried minds, and the St. Francisville area offers the chance to be safe, socially distanced and mask-wearing, while getting away from the stress and uncertainty of the COVID-19 issues.

A celebration of the Fourth of July, hosted by longtime St. Francisville mayor Billy D’Aquilla, takes place at the West Feliciana Sports Park complex off US 61 at Hardwood, with plenty of outdoor areas for social distancing. Music and refreshments begin at 6; fireworks display starts at dark.

While the popular waterfalls of Clark Creek Natural Area remain off limits at present, there are alternative hiking areas in the Tunica Hills Wildlife Management Area off the Old Tunica Road, as well as the 109-acre Mary Ann Brown Preserve on LA 965. The nearby Audubon State Historic Site has an easy hiking trail and picnic pavilion, while the extensive West Feliciana Sports Park offers paved paths, fishing pond and picnic areas, ballfields and courts, and a challenging wooded hiking trail called The Beast. Cat Island National Wildlife Refuge also has hiking trails, but accessibility depends on the flood stages of the Mississippi River. The old ferry landing location at the foot of Ferdinand St. is the best place to launch boats into the Mississippi River, and many of the area’s creeks have sandy beaches.

Most of the overnight accommodations are functioning, although Shadetree won’t reopen until October, the Barrow House has permanently closed, and The Cottage Plantation will not be open in July. Others offer safe, sanitized lodging. The St. Francisville Inn, The Myrtles, Butler Greenwood, the Bluffs on Thompson Creek and Lake Rosemound B&Bs plus two motels are fully open; Hemingbough offers overnight stays but no breakfast at this point.

Greenwood Plantation in Weyanoke is open for B&B but offers house tours by appointment only, while the two state historic sites, Rosedown and Oakley (Audubon), are open daily for spaced tours inside and plenty of beautiful gardens and grounds to stroll through.

Shops are open and most are capable of accommodating all Covid safety requirements including the wearing of face masks. Hours for July are as follows: Backwoods Gallery Tuesday through Sunday 10-5; Harrington Gallery open by appointment (225-635-4214); Temple Design Monday through Friday 9-5, design consultations by appointment (225-635-9454); Patrick’s Fine Jewelry Monday through Friday 9:30 to 5:30, Saturday 10 to 5:30; District Mercantile Monday through Saturday 10-5, Sunday 1-5; Mia Sophia Florist Monday through Friday 9 to 5:30, Saturday 9 to 3; Trends Salon and Boutique Tuesday through Friday 9 to 5, Saturday 9 to 2; Sage Hill Monday through Saturday 10 to 5; Away Down South, normal hours 11 to 4. Other shops are also open with regular hours as well.

Restaurants are all open except Magnolia Café, which is doing some renovating. They offer a mixture of spaced indoor dining, outside patio dining, and take-out. The tourism map shows not only locations but on the back has phone numbers for each place, so diners can access menus online and call in a take-out order if they desire.

In this unsettled time, when changes seem to occur minute by minute, it is always a good idea to check locally for up-to-date information. St. Francisville has plenty to offer in this time of crisis, and it’s not really necessary to lose your mind, as John Muir suggested, only to rest your mind, clear your mind, relieving it of anxieties and worries by relaxing and enjoying a getaway to the country, soothed by the beauties of Nature as well as the small-town charm of boutique shops and small restaurants and overnight accommodations trying to awaken back to life after several months of shut-downs and isolation.

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; check locally for coronavirus mitigation requirements, please. Several splendidly restored plantation homes are open for tours: The Cottage Plantation (weekends), Myrtles Plantation, Greenwood Plantation, plus Catalpa Plantation by reservation; Afton Villa Gardens is open in season. Particularly important to tourism in the area are its two significant state historic sites, Rosedown Plantation (a National Historic Landmark) 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.
The nearby Tunica Hills region offers unmatched recreational activities in its unspoiled wilderness areas—hiking, biking and bicycle racing due to the challenging terrain, 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 in 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 www.stfrancisville.us, www.stfrancisvillefestivals.com, or www.stfrancisville.net (the events calendar gives dates and information on special activities).

Metz Calls us back to Nature in St. Francisville

noreply@blogger.com (Blue Goose Media) — Wed, 20 May 2020 20:10:00 +0000

Metz Calls us back to Nature in St. Francisville
By Anne Butler; images by Darrell Chitty

Justin Metz has a musical ear and an artistic eye, and he puts both to work crafting his gorgeous duck calls that are in demand all across the country. And he does it all in a little well-equipped workshop in the wooded paradise called the Tunica Hills.
He had the good fortune to be born into a family that for generations lived close to the land---loggers and hunters, cattlemen and self-sufficient farmers, horticulturists and of course hunters. His favorite memory, back when he started duck hunting as a young teen, was heading out at 3 or 4 a.m. for the simple cottage on the edge of Cat Island swamp; he could hear the television blaring way down the road along Bayou Sara creek, because Uncle Moochie and Uncle Dump were both hearing impaired after years of running chainsaws and heavy machinery. There was always coffee brewing, breakfast on the table even at that hour, and after a brief visit, Justin would be off into the swamp waters, with ducks coming in, the excitement of a brisk north wind in his face, and he felt like he was in heaven. He was hooked.
Louisiana, with its abundance of waterways and swamps, is the most important wintering area for over 3 million North American waterfowl every year; Louisiana Wildlife Insider calls the sheer size and diversity of our wetland habitats integral to meeting the life cycle demands of millions of waterfowl migrating up and down the Mississippi Flyway. But Justin Metz was not satisfied with the commercially stamped duck calls available in big box stores, and so in 2011, after years of sitting and listening to ducks from his blind, he knew he could mimic the sounds that convinced them to commit to come in and land.

Duck calls are made with a barrel and insert, a tone board and exhaust. The reed on the tone board vibrates when air passes under it to a channel on the tone board; that’s where the sound comes from, and then the air travels out of the exhaust. It’s the curvature of the tone board and the thickness and length of the reed that gives the variation of sound. The type and density of the wood also affects the sound; the tighter the grain in the wood, the crisper the sound. Consequently Metz Calls uses an assortment of exotic woods like African Blackwood, Cocobola, Osage, as well as local woods like Black Walnut and Cherry and Buckeye Burl. To seal the wood, he soaks his calls in burnt linseed oil, just like all the old callmakers used. Some of his duck calls now are also acrylic.

Once he had perfected the shape and sound of his duck calls, Metz began adding artistic touches like carvings, many with specific meanings, all hand turned and freehand engraved. He makes his own bands as well, turning out what are essentially working pieces of fine art.

Before he and his wife Misty had children, they travelled to sportsmen’s shows where he would sell thousands; now, as a business owner, raising a family and serving his community as a member of the parish council governing board, he doesn’t travel much, but sells his calls in a number of retail outlets. He estimates that he has sold calls to duck hunters in every state and even in Germany.

One special design shows a carved flying duck, rice fields and a raised state map, with the lettering “Bring Them Back,” a reference to the declining duck presence; the 2018-2019 duck season was called the worst in 50 years. Justin, head of the local Ducks Unlimited chapter, attributes this decline in the number of migrating ducks and geese in this area to a number of factors, including a shift in migration routes westward, much of it due to man’s footprint; also loss of habitat, changes in Midwestern agricultural practices like no-till farming leaving grain spillage on the ground to provide food for ducks between crops, too much rain and high water, mild winters and fewer northern cold fronts.
In south Louisiana, vast flat fields of sugar cane aren’t suitable for ducks, and many rice farmers in southwest Louisiana are now growing GMO rice, a very abrasive grain less desirable as a food source for waterfowl. But the state will always have thousands and thousands of migratory waterfowl and consequently thousands of enthusiastic duck hunters tempting them from blinds in wetlands and swamps, many using one of Justin Metz’ works of art, noted as much for beautiful craftsmanship as for exacting tone.

Contact information: online email metzcalls@yahoo.com or phone 225-721-0580.

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; check locally for coronavirus mitigation requirements, please. Several splendidly restored plantation homes are open for tours: The Cottage Plantation (weekends), Myrtles Plantation, Greenwood Plantation, plus Catalpa Plantation by reservation; Afton Villa Gardens is open in season. Particularly important to tourism in the area are its two significant state historic sites, Rosedown Plantation (a National Historic Landmark) 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.

The nearby Tunica Hills region offers unmatched recreational activities in its unspoiled wilderness areas—hiking, biking and bicycle racing due to the challenging terrain, 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 in 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 o r 225-635-4224, or St. Francisville Main Street at 225-635-3873; online www.stfrancisville.us, www.stfrancisvillefestivals.com, or www.stfrancisville.net (the events calendar gives dates and information on special activities).

Photo credit:
Darrell Chitty
Master Artist
2840 Cypress Village Drive
Benton, LA 71006
318-349-9085

Flying Charlie McDermott and St. Francisville’s New Elementary School Suit Each

noreply@blogger.com (Blue Goose Media) — Wed, 29 Apr 2020 22:05:00 +0000

Flying Charlie McDermott and St. Francisville’s New Elementary School Suit Each Other
By Anne Butler

The loss of historically significant structures, whether to fire or flood or neglect, is disheartening to say the least. Sometimes, though, these historic homes are replicated. Sometimes, when the home itself is a total loss, the gardens and landscaping can be salvaged. And sometimes, when home and gardens are gone, the property itself can be rejuvenated in unexpectedly appropriate ways. That’s what is going to happen at Waverly Plantation, just north of the attractive campus where all of the St. Francisville area students go to school.
The West Feliciana Parish public school system is considered one of the best in the state, and its newer Lower Elementary and Middle School buildings are top rate as well. Parish residents are so supportive of the system that they recently voted tax funding to provide upgrades to the high school and some of its attached facilities. With student enrollment increasing yearly, the funding also covers an entirely new Upper Elementary building to replace the crowded and dated current structure.
And happily, just to the north of the Middle School complex lay Waverly Plantation. The main house there, built on a 1790s Spanish land grant, was a beautifully austere double-galleried frame structure, its entrance doors enhanced by fanlights and sidelights. It was actually located in the tiny community called Bains after Dr. Henry Bains, and when it burned in 1972 it was the home of another longtime parish physician, Dr. Alfred Gould.
But it was a third physician, the brother-in-law of Dr. Bains, who gained national notoriety for his 19th-century scientific experiments. Because of him, it is entirely appropriate that the Waverly property will find new life as an elementary school on the expanded campus of one of the state’s best public school systems, where STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) and other innovative programs encourage exactly the same mindset that inspired the early owner of the property who was known as Flying Charlie McDermott.
McDermott, of Irish descent and an 1828 graduate of the Sheffield Scientific School at Yale University, inherited Waverly and became a respected physician at the encouragement of his brother-in-law. But like creative geniuses and dreamers from the time of Leonardo da Vinci, he was irresistibly drawn to the study of the mechanics of a flying machine, and for forty years was said to be constantly leaping out of the live oaks or dashing pell-mell down the nearest slope with the latest iteration of his invention.
By 1842 he told the Daily Picayune that he had “a kite 110 feet long, 20 feet broad, and tapering to each end like the wings of a fishhawk. Under the center of the kite I have a frame 18 feet high, in which I stand. Under the kite are four wings which operate horizontally like the oars of a boat. They are moved by the muscles of the legs. The blades of the oars are made of a series of valves resembling Venetian blinds so that they open when they move forward and close when the stroke is made.” By 1872 he had been issued Patent Number 133046 from the U.S. Patent Office for “Improvement in Apparatus for Navigating the Air,” but by then he was an old man. He said he probably knew more than any other living soul on the subject of aerostation, adding that “when in the future the air is filled with flying men and women, the wonder will be that a thing so simple was not done long ago.”
Flying Charlie McDermott’s early experiments with human flight preceded the 1903 Wright brothers’ Kitty Hawk ascent by nearly half a century. He was quoted in a newspaper of 1882, “It is mortifying that a stinking buzzard and a stupid goose should fly, and man, the lord of all the earth, should be any longer confined to the land and water. Many sails, one above the other, and a horizontal propulsion, is the secret, which was never known until I discovered it by analysis and synthesis, and which will fill the air with flying men and women.”
He and his brother eventually moved to Arkansas, where he became such an influential citizen that the whole town was named for him (Dermott), although he continued to manage his Louisiana property as well, making arduous trips back and forth. One 1842 letter describes his arrival at Waverly looking “very thin, says he has had nothing to eat since he left, rode 12 miles with a heavy rifle on his shoulder and 12 more with a deer on his horse. And to crown the whole, slept 3 nights in an Arkansas tavern, resting his head on a pillow that had a dead rat in it.”
After the Civil War, he joined Charlie Barrow of West Feliciana in founding colonies in Honduras. And it would not take a big stretch of the imagination to understand his excitement could he but know the use to which his Waverly property will be going, encouraging little minds to think out of the box and let their own imaginations soar.
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. Several splendidly restored plantation homes are open for tours: The Cottage Plantation (weekends), Myrtles Plantation, Greenwood Plantation, plus Catalpa Plantation by reservation; Afton Villa Gardens is open in season. Particularly important to tourism in the area are its two significant state historic sites, Rosedown Plantation (a National Historic Landmark) 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.
The nearby Tunica Hills region offers unmatched recreational activities in its unspoiled wilderness areas—hiking, biking and bicycle racing due to the challenging terrain, 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 in 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 o r 225-635-4224, or St. Francisville Main Street at 225-635-3873; online www.stfrancisville.us, www.stfrancisvillefestivals.com, or www.stfrancisville.net (the events calendar gives dates and information on special activities).

St. Francisville in the Time of Covid-19

noreply@blogger.com (Blue Goose Media) — Tue, 31 Mar 2020 01:08:00 +0000

St. Francisville in the Time of Covid-19

By Anne Butler

So, in this scary time of social distancing and sheltering in place, some of us are using the downtime to reconnect with family and commune with nature, exercising and eating sensibly. Others, not so much…our only exercise is jogging to the icebox and getting lazier by the minute; we’ll be sorry when we have to give up our comfy pants and PJs for clothes with belts or waistbands. And it’s far from funny, but there are times when humor and prayer are our only comforts, and Lord knows there’s some hysterical stuff on social media these days.

We’ve been down this road before. A wonderful fact-filled article by that esteemed historian/author Brian James Costello of Pointe Coupee, just across the Mississippi River from St. Francisville and thus experiencing similar trials and tribulations, examines the historical antecedents of the Covid-19 Pandemic through the early years of constant floods and epidemics which plagued the area. There were 18 major river floods from 1770 through 1927; he reminds us that the disastrous 1882 flooding of the Mississippi River put four feet of water on Main Street in New Roads and five feet in St. Mary’s Cemetery, necessitating that Mrs. Philogene Langlois’ funeral procession proceed by boat and her remains had to be entombed in the uppermost vault). There were also numerous disastrous outbreaks of yellow fever, cholera, typhoid fever and influenza. The 1918 Influenza Pandemic, according to New Orleans and Baton Rouge newspapers of the time, reported 245,000 flu cases throughout Louisiana, resulting in over 5,000 deaths.

Correspondence from author F. Scott Fitzgerald, quarantined in 1920 in the south of France during the Spanish Influenza outbreak, reads as follows: “Dearest Rosemary, It was a limpid dreary day hung as in a basket from a single dull star…Outside I perceive what may be a collection of fallen leaves tussling against a trash can. It rings like jazz to my ears. The streets are that empty. It seems as though the bulk of the city has retreated to their quarters, rightfully so. At this time, it seems very poignant to avoid all public spaces. Even the bars, as I told Hemingway, but to that he punched me in the stomach… The officials have alerted us to ensure we have a month’s worth of necessities. Zelda and I have stocked up on red wine, whiskey, rum, vermouth, absinthe, white wine, sherry, gin, and Lord, if we need it, brandy. Please pray for us.”

And here we are a full century later, sheltering in place with only essential businesses operating (grocery and liquor stores still doing a brisk if carefully controlled business in “Lord, if we need it, brandy” and other staples of ordinary life). There are two big differences, however. In Louisiana, accustomed as we are to hurricanes and ensuing weeks-long power outages, we are grateful to have electricity and air conditioning. And then there is the enormous impact of social media, restoring a sense of community even as we remain homebound for what may seem like a very long time. Elementary school kids are connecting online through Zoom and Instagram and all sorts of sites, doing lessons, touring museums and zoos and parks, listening to celebrities like Oprah read children’s books, chatting with the little friends they miss so much; high schools and colleges have offered online classes. Farflung families are staying in touch, in spite of their next travel destination being from Las Kitchenas to Los Bed or La Rotonda De Sofa. One hairstylist posted pictures of her longhaired long-suffering boyfriend sporting a new hairdo every day, from George Washington to Princess Leia. Ladies are going from no makeup the first week to no bra the next, being reminded what their real hair color is and hearing stylists beg them not to cut their bangs, learning that Baby Wipes are good for more than a baby’s behind and toilet paper is a valuable commodity, and who knew how many times we touch our faces. And boom, it appears that we don’t need Hollywood as much as we need farmers and grocery store stockers and truckers, first responders and all levels of brave medical staff.

So what can you, an individual, do? Isolate, quarantine, shelter in place so as not to spread the disease and to flatten the wave, remembering to appreciate that you’re not stuck at home, you’re safe at home. Go into your yard to listen to the birds and watch the squirrels. Walk your dog; if you don’t have one, foster one, because there’s nothing more soothing than petting a dog or cat. If you live in a highrise, go out onto your balcony and join the chorus of singers or musicians or handclappers showing appreciation for all those laboring in the trenches. If you live in a suburban neighborhood, have a drive-by parade celebrating youngsters’ birthdays with honks and signs and balloons in lieu of in-person parties. Digital books, libraries, concerts, lectures, all of these and more are available online. Listen online to the growing number of out-of-work musicians like David Doucet of the eternally popular Cajun band Beausolail posting webcasts and virtual gigs from courtyards and other improv stages to keep the creative juices flowing and maybe even get a few donations into online tip hats like MusiCares; there are some fabulous syncs of choirs whose members are participating from across the world. Appreciate the community responsibility and generosity of folks like Drew Brees and Ralph Lauren, and if you’re not a millionaire, show your support for restaurants offering take-out meals or purchase gift certificates for later use at B&Bs, which have also lost all business due to event cancellations and home isolation.

And don’t forget to laugh. As Aunty Acid says, “Please don’t mistake my humor about the virus as a lack of seriousness or concern. Laughing through difficult times happens to be how I got through my entire life so far.” And on Facebook, there are some really hilarious postings:

So you’re staying inside, practicing social distancing and cleaning yourself? Congratulations, you’ve become a house cat.

Some of y’all are gonna be beggin’ Jolene to take your man before this quarantine is over.

Pretty is out. Now men want a woman who can catch a chicken.

Girl, I know you hear these kids out here. I’m ‘bout to bite one (picture of legs lounging in bathtub with dog sticking his head around the curtain)

Dog again: Girl, I almost bit you. Where is your wig, eyelashes and makeup?

Getting real tired of babysitting my mom’s grandkids right now (as old folks, considered the most vulnerable, are no longer available to babysit).

I’m stocking up on ice cream, canned fruit, raspberry sauce and sprinkles. I’m planning to self-isolate for a month of Sundaes.

This quarantine has me realizing why my dog gets so excited about something moving outside, going for a walk or car rides. I think I just barked at a squirrel.

I swear my fridge just said, “What the hell do you want NOW?”

After years of wanting to thoroughly clean my house but lacking the time, this week I discovered that wasn’t the reason.

Mona Lisa taking advantage of the closure of the Louvre to take a little time for herself (shown in sun glasses with exposed legs crossed, cigarette in hand, wine glass and guitar nearby).

My body has absorbed so much soap and disinfectant lately that when I pee, it cleans the toilet.

I never thought I’d see the day when weed was easier to get than hand sanitizer and toilet paper.
I ate 11 times and took 5 naps and it’s still today.

I’m from Louisiana. Talk to me in a language I understand. Is the virus a Category 4 or 5?

I don’t think anyone expected that when we changed the clocks earlier this month, we’d go from standard time to the Twilight Zone.

Now you can really dance like no one is watching.

Y’all are about to find out why your great-grandmother washed her aluminum foil and saved her bacon grease.

Mosquitos be waking up from winter like “Where y’all at??”

My mom always told me I wouldn’t accomplish anything by laying in the bed all day. But look at me now, I’m saving the world.

Homeschool Day One: Spankings and prayer about to return to classroom.
Homeschool Day Two: For science, we studied the effects of NyQuil on students.
Homeschool Day Three: If you see my kids locked outside today, mind your own business. We are having a fire drill.
Homeschool Day Four: One of those little bastards called in a bomb threat.
Homeschool Day Five: Science project (image of copper moonshine still).
Homeschool Day Six: And just like that, nobody ever asked why teachers need a fall break, spring break or the entire summer off again.

And then there’s this: In the rush to return to normal, use this time to consider which parts of normal are worth rushing back to. On the 26th day of March, 2020, attention was called to Isaiah 26-20: “Come, my people, enter your chambers and shut your doors behind you; hide yourselves for a little while until the fury has passed.”

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. Several splendidly restored plantation homes are usually open for tours: The Cottage Plantation (weekends), Myrtles Plantation, Greenwood Plantation, plus Catalpa Plantation by reservation; Afton Villa Gardens is open in season. Particularly important to tourism in the area are its two significant state historic sites, Rosedown Plantation (a National Historic Landmark) 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. At this stage, check locally in this fluid situation; some outdoor spaces are open, but no house tours; restaurants are limited to take out only, and some are closed.

The nearby Tunica Hills region offers unmatched recreational activities in its unspoiled wilderness areas—hiking, biking and bicycle racing due to the challenging terrain, 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 in St. Francisville’s extensive National Register-listed historic district, and there are also modern motel accommodations for large bus groups. Again, check locally for closures.
For visitor information, call West Feliciana Tourist Commission and West Feliciana Historical Society at 225-6330 o r 225-635-4224, or St. Francisville Main Street at 225-635-3873; online www.stfrancisville.us, www.stfrancisvillefestivals.com, or www.stfrancisville.net (the events calendar gives dates and information on special activities).

Something Old and Something New at St. Francisville’s popular Audubon Pilgrimage

noreply@blogger.com (Blue Goose Media) — Sun, 01 Mar 2020 01:20:00 +0000

Something Old and Something New at St. Francisville’s popular Audubon Pilgrimage
By Anne Butler

The forty-ninth annual Audubon Pilgrimage March 20, 21 and 22, 2020, celebrates a southern spring in St. Francisville, the glorious garden spot of Louisiana’s English Plantation Country. For nearly half a century the sponsoring West Feliciana Historical Society has thrown open the doors of significant historic structures to commemorate artist-naturalist John James Audubon’s 1821 stay as he painted a number of his famous bird studies and tutored the daughter of Oakley Plantation’s Pirrie family, beautiful young Eliza.
Two venerable townhouses in St. Francisville’s National Register-listed downtown Historic District are featured on this year’s pilgrimage. Amidst meandering Royal Street’s significant treasures is Prospect, built in 1809; during Audubon’s tenure it was occupied by Dr. Isaac Smith, early physician, LA State Senate president and great advocate of higher education. Another public-service minded figure, Dr. O.D.Brooks, purchased Prospect in 1879. As a 16-year-old boy he saw Civil War action alongside his father, owned the Royal Hotel, had a pharmacy, and served on the School Board for three decades, facilitating establishment of the parish’s first public school.

On Ferdinand St., the second of downtown’s two main historic streets, Baier House was a simple four-room cottage considerably embellished by former mayor and master carpenter George Baier when he finally moved from flood-prone Bayou Sara up the hill to the safety of St. Francisville’s high-and-dry location. He had nearly drowned in Bayou Sara in the flood of 1920/21, when the Weydert brothers saved him as he held onto ropes trying to keep his house from being washed away. Its steep backyard gives testament to St. Francisville’s description as the little town that’s two miles long and two yards wide.

In the countryside, Spring Grove was built in 1895 on lands carved from Afton Villa Plantation for Barrow descendent Wade Hampton Richardson IV. It was considered an ideal country home supplied with modern conveniences to make rural life agreeable. When his only daughter married at 18, the house was expanded so that she could raise her family there, and in later years it has expanded even more…a bedroom here, a bigger kitchen there…to warmly welcome subsequent generations.

Another country house is the Lemon-Argue House, fine example of vernacular architecture and a fascinating yeoman farmer’s cottage illustrative of 18th-century timbering techniques with its handhewn logs of blue poplar. Built by Irish immigrant William Lemon around 1801 on a Spanish land grant, it has recently been donated by his descendants to LSU and the Rural Life Museum for use as a classroom, research lab and historic house museum providing hands-on experience for students in many different fields. Minimally furnished for pilgrimage tours, this is a preservation work in progress.

Other popular features of the 2020 Audubon Pilgrimage include Afton Villa Gardens, Audubon (Oakley) and Rosedown State Historic Sites, three 19th-century churches in town and beautiful St. John’s and St. Mary’s in the country, plus the Rural Homestead with lively demonstrations of the rustic skills of daily pioneer life.
Audubon Market Hall hosts an exhibit of vintage jewelry, an Audubon Bird Exhibit will be shown at Oakley, guided birding opportunities pay tribute to Audubon himself, and other exhibits featuring black history will be at the Old Benevolent Society building.

Friday evening features old-time Hymn Singing at the United Methodist Church, Graveyard Tours at Grace Episcopal cemetery (last tour begins at 8:15 p.m.), and a wine and cheese reception (7 to 9 p.m.) featuring the pilgrimage’s exquisitely detailed 1820’s evening costumes, nationally recognized for their authenticity.
New this year will be two evening tours on Friday night only. Sainte Reine on Royal Street, its name a reminder of the area’s first tiny fort dating from the 1720s, was built in 1894 by Max Mann, Bayou Sara saloonkeeper and merchant who had the good sense to move up on the St. Francisville bluff high above the river floodwaters that plagued the immigrant merchants below. On Ferdinand St., Hilltop is a wonderful old Acadian-Creole house probably dating from the 1840s. It was moved from Bayou Lafourche to a lot consisting at most of a foot or two of level ground beside the street and then a precipitous drop 40 or 50 feet to the creek below.

Daytime features are open 9:30 to 5; Friday evening activities are scheduled from 6 to 9 p.m.; Saturday soiree, Light Up The Night, features live music and dancing, dinner and drinks, beginning at 7 p.m. Featured homes: Prospect, Baier House, Spring Grove and Lemon-Argue House will only be shown on Friday and Saturday; Sunday the Sullivan barn at Wyoming Plantation hosts a Gospel Brunch, another inviting innovation this year. Open all three days will be the churches, Audubon (Oakley) and Rosedown State Historic Sites, Afton Villa Gardens and the Rural Homestead.

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.
Other March activities center around oak-shaded Parker Park in downtown St. Francisville. On Saturday, March 7, A Walk In The Park features music, crafts and art; hours are from 10 to 4, and the local food truck, A Hint Of Lime Tacos, will be there with authentic street tacos with homemade cheese, original salsas and specialty cremas. Then on Saturday, March 28, from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m., the Tunica Hills Music Festival and Jam features a family-friendly get-together with food vendors and three stages full of continuous performances of many genres of music by the likes of the Bagasse Boyz, Clay Parker and Jody James, traditional gospel choir performances at dusk, and jam circles with attendees encouraged to bring their own instruments and join in the fun.

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. Several splendidly restored plantation homes are open for tours: The Cottage Plantation (weekends), Myrtles Plantation, Greenwood Plantation, plus Catalpa Plantation by reservation; Afton Villa Gardens is open in season. Particularly important to tourism in the area are its two significant state historic sites, Rosedown Plantation (a National Historic Landmark) 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.

The nearby Tunica Hills region offers unmatched recreational activities in its unspoiled wilderness areas—hiking, biking and bicycle racing due to the challenging terrain, 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 in 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 o r 225-635-4224, or St. Francisville Main Street at 225-635-3873; online www.stfrancisville.us, www.stfrancisvillefestivals.com, or www.stfrancisville.net (the events calendar gives dates and information on special activities).

St. Francisville’s Celebration of Rural Life Skills

noreply@blogger.com (Blue Goose Media) — Wed, 12 Feb 2020 01:20:00 +0000

St. Francisville’s Celebration of Rural Life Skills
By Anne Butler
The forty-ninth annual Audubon Pilgrimage March 20, 21 and 22, 2020, celebrates a southern spring and artist John James Audubon’s productive stay in the area in 1821. On tour will be several venerable townhouses in St. Francisville’s National Register Historic District, two country houses dating from the 1800s, historic gardens and churches, graveyard tours and hymn singing, Friday candlelight tours, Saturday night soiree and Sunday gospel brunch, and of course lots of bird-related activities.

But one of the most popular features, for both adults and children, has proven to be the Rural Homestead, and it has been that way since the mid-1970s. That’s when the directors of the West Feliciana Historical Society, in a prescient attempt to provide a balanced presentation of parish history, decided to recreate a setting suitable for demonstrating rural life with all its requisite skills and homespun crafts while there were still some folks around who remembered how to do them.

Besides the plantation big houses and the quarters for enslaved workers, there were many small yeoman farmers, both black and white, eking out a hardscrabble existence, clearing small landholdings and erecting rough dwellings either on their own or with the help of a small number of slaves. It is that simple way of life that the Rural Homestead celebrates.

The 1977 pilgrimage brochure explained the intent this way: “The Rural Homestead is a major project of the Historical Society which will…tell the story of rural life in this parish. The landscape is changing rapidly and folkways that lent stability and commonality to those in all walks of rural life are vanishing. Not enough is being said today about the daily life of rural folk and their homely skills, some of them dating from pioneer times. Their story is just as much a part of the storied past as are the white pillars of the Old South…More than a nostalgic look backwards, this effort will create a new awareness as a living historical interpretation…”

And so began the Rural Homestead, with simple structures built in the traditional manner by carpenters using time-honored practices passed down through the generations, inside which demonstrations of significant 19th-century skills and crafts provide an understanding of early life in the Felicianas. And it is heartwarming to see third and fourth-generation workers of all ages…Daniels, Harveys, Temples, Ritchies, Lindseys, Metzes and more…carrying on the traditions today.

Corn was an all-important crop in the 19th century, providing sustenance for both people and livestock, and the Homestead’s operational gasoline-powered Gristmill with its original stones shows how dried corn was ground to make cornbread and other staples of country life. In the Kitchen, long the heart of rural life and usually detached from the main abode due to the heat and danger of fire, costumed interpreters churn butter and turn the ground corn into delicious cracklin’ cornbread over a woodburning stove. The Kitchen building, called a single pen structure with front and rear porches, was constructed from old materials salvaged locally, some pieces still bearing the marks of the broad ax and the foot adze used for squaring round logs. The framing follows practices carried over from half-timbered buildings, and the carpenter learned his skills from his grandfather.

The Kitchen is roofed with cypress shingles, as were all the early structures in West Feliciana; they were weather resistant, fire resistant, termite resistant. Making these shingles using a froe to peel them from a cypress log is a dying art. It is demonstrated on site by a member of a family long associated with such practice; he’s the only one left to do so, and he uses a treasured century-old draw knife that’s been used by generations.

Inside the dogtrot Quilters’ Cottage, so named for the open passageway separating the two sections of the structure, may be seen quilters, spinners and weavers, as well as hook rug making and perhaps tatting. Farm wives had to cord cotton or twist wool fibers into thread with a drop spindle before sewing or knitting clothing, bedding, curtains and other decorative fabrics. On the porch there will be a display of brown cotton as well as candle making.

The Commissary, which traditionally served the significant function of storing bulk provisions in barrels, croker sacks, demijohns and large stoneware crocks, will feature basket weaving and a doll maker on the porch, with items such as wooden buckets and birdhouses for sale. This structure also houses modern conveniences like restrooms, and a Clementine Hunter-inspired student art show on Saturday below a wonderful wall-sized Hunter mural.

The Blacksmith Shop recalls the early methods of forging and repairing the all-important farming equipment, horseshoes, wagon wheels and other metals over an open fire. Today, hooks and simple fireplace tools are made, and demonstrations of woodburning are given; some of these items may be purchased.
There’s a board-and-batten crib barn, and other tin-roofed sheds shelter typical farm animals. Visitors can observe how ground was broken for planting prior to the advent of modern mechanical miracles like tractors, when it was done by plow behind well-trained mules.

Many different sizes of cast-iron pots were utilized for all sorts of chores, from cane syrup making to cooking and laundry. Cracklin’s are pig skins being cooked in a big iron pot over an open fire near the lye soap makers, both activities utilizing the rendered lard in which fish is also fried.

Water and soft drinks may be purchased from the refreshment wagon, plate lunches are available 11:30 to 1:30 near conveniently placed picnic tables, and old-time music enlivens the happy conviviality that characterized the frolics of an earlier day as Audubon Pilgrims step into the rural past.

As a 1976 article in the local newspaper said, “Not every door in fabled West Feliciana swung open on silver hinges. Most swung on plain iron hinges, and some even on wooden hinges.” The Rural Homestead was conceived and still is an effort to record vanishing folkways and create a new awareness of the need for preservation and conservation, and it was implemented just in the nick of time to capture the 19th-century practices and skills being passed along by “the collective remnant of the last generation to have known 19th-century rural ways.”

Audubon Pilgrimage tour tickets cover visits to the Rural Homestead, but visitors may purchase a separate ticket just for the Rural Homestead for $3 adults, children 12 and under free. These tickets are only available at the Homestead site. Open Friday, Saturday and Sunday from 9 to 5.

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. Several splendidly restored plantation homes are open for tours: The Cottage Plantation (weekends), Myrtles Plantation, Greenwood Plantation, plus Catalpa Plantation by reservation; Afton Villa Gardens is open in season. Particularly important to tourism in the area are its two significant state historic sites, Rosedown Plantation (a National Historic Landmark) 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.

The nearby Tunica Hills region offers unmatched recreational activities in its unspoiled wilderness areas—hiking, biking and bicycle racing due to the challenging terrain, 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 in 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 o r 225-635-4224, or St. Francisville Main Street at 225-635-3873; online www.stfrancisville.us, www.stfrancisvillefestivals.com, or www.stfrancisville.net (the events calendar gives dates and information on special activities).

Touch of St. Francisville Travels to New Orleans Museum of Art

noreply@blogger.com (Blue Goose Media) — Tue, 28 Jan 2020 03:18:00 +0000

Touch of St. Francisville Travels to New Orleans Museum of Art
By Anne Butler
It is called one of the South’s best preserved formal Victorian parlors, and the New Orleans Museum of Art now has it on permanent exhibit. Moved in its entirety from English Plantation Country in St. Francisville, it is shown not only as a perfect representation of an era in history, but also as a tribute to those skilled craftsmen, both free and enslaved, capable of creating such beauty.
On a plantation established in the 1790s by her father, the area’s first physician, Harriett Flower Mathews began assembling the room’s elegant furnishing and decorations as clouds of Civil War gathered. The ninth generation of direct descendants occupy the property now, but it was five generations of strong women who preserved the parlor intact.

In the 1850s, widowed upon the death of her husband Judge George Mathews of Louisiana’s first Supreme Court, the determined Mrs. Mathews refused to be inconvenienced by the rumblings of war, ordering deliveries from fine merchants across the country: marble mantels from Kent & Fuller in St. Louis in 1855, wall-to-wall floral strip carpeting (53 7/8 yards) with a central medallion made most likely in England from Bayou Sara retailer I. Meyer & Hoffman, 9-foot-tall gilded pier mirrors and silk lambrequin curtains from the New Orleans retailer C. Flint & Jones but no doubt also imported from Europe.

The day before Louisiana seceded from the Union on January 26, 1861, a large order was placed for a sumptuous rosewood parlor suite from Hubbell & Curtis of Bridgeport, Connecticut, beautifully carved in the Rococo Revival style with flowers, fine fabrics, carved scrolls and fruit clusters. Harriett Mathews may well have visited the manufacturing site on visits to her son, who attended Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., as she also patronized a number of early nurseries Up East to order plants and ironwork for landscaping. In all, the parlor would contain a 12-piece set of rosewood furniture including several sofas, several styles of chairs, marble-topped tables, and a fine mahogany etagere beside the pier mirrors and lambrequins held with calla-lily tiebacks.

The Mathews family could well afford such grandeur, owning in the 1850s four extensive productive cotton and sugar plantations across the state. But then came wartime troubles. In April of 1861 a letter was received from Hubbell & Curtis, requesting acknowledgment of receipt of the furnishings. “We are aware that troublesome times are come to all parts of our country, and the largest part of the calamity must fall on the manufacturing interest of the country. Our business is nearly ruined. But if our friends who are able will pay us…”

Succeeding generations kept the parlor intact with careful use, in the exact setting and in the original fabric, until the present generation, mindful of how rarely do our children want our old things, began to fret about its future. She didn’t want it divided; she didn’t want it to be auctioned off; she didn’t want it to go to an inappropriate place. Since the property had never been sold outside the original family, the attic remained full of trunks and trunks of original invoices and journals; many records were placed in the Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley collection of histories at LSU, but some were still on site.

Along came the late New Orleans attorney Paul Haygood and his interns from the Classical Institute of the South, doing an inaugural summer study of plantations in the St. Francisville area, where they were incredibly impressed with the sheer volume and quality of preserved material culture as well as the documentation through invoices and correspondence from providing merchants. And working closely with Mel Buchanan, the RosaMary Curator of Decorative Arts and Design at the New Orleans Museum of Art, the perfect solution was found. After all, there had always been close ties between St. Francisville and the Crescent City, with planters and their families travelling by steamboat south to handle business matters, socialize and shop, attend carnival festivities and board ocean-going vessels for trips to the East Coast or Europe.

In 2014 a fleet of climate-controlled eighteen-wheelers parked on the front lawns of Butler Greenwood Plantation, while inside, an army of professional fine-art movers made crates for every single piece of the parlor furnishings…carpeting, sofas and chairs, etagere, towering pier mirrors, lambrequins and delicate calla lily tiebacks. This was all carefully transported to the New Orleans Museum of Art in City Park and given a light conservation for an introductory exhibit in October 2015. Now, as of December 20, 2019, it has been opened as a permanent exhibit for all to see.

Cognizant of current sensibilities, museum staff made sure that this is a celebration of all segments of society during the antebellum period, including the labor of the enslaved who made many more important contributions than picking cotton…there were skilled craftsmen, knowledgeable horticulturists, blacksmiths, seamstresses and weavers, culinary artists and many more whose talents and hard work provided the backbone and underpinnings for the cotton culture, and who are just now getting their due recognition. In the NOMA parlor exhibit are displayed small iron nails, obviously forged on the place. Examples of the skill of plantation blacksmiths, these tacks were used to secure the strips of carpeting to the cypress floor below, just a tiny reminder that there were contributions both great and small.

“History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived,” said author Maya Angelou, “but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.”

For information on hours and fees, look online at www.noma.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. Several splendidly restored plantation homes are open for tours: The Cottage Plantation (weekends), Myrtles Plantation, Greenwood Plantation, plus Catalpa Plantation by reservation; Afton Villa Gardens is open in season. Particularly important to tourism in the area are its two significant state historic sites, Rosedown Plantation (a National Historic Landmark) 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.
The nearby Tunica Hills region offers unmatched recreational activities in its unspoiled wilderness areas—hiking, biking and bicycle racing due to the challenging terrain, 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 in 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 o r 225-635-4224, or St. Francisville Main Street at 225-635-3873; online www.stfrancisville.us, www.stfrancisvillefestivals.com, or www.stfrancisville.net (the events calendar gives dates and information on special activities).

Photos by Rich Johnson

West Feliciana’s New Tourism Director Actually An Old Hand

noreply@blogger.com (Blue Goose Media) — Wed, 22 Jan 2020 14:31:00 +0000

West Feliciana’s New Tourism Director Actually An Old Hand
By Anne Butler
St. Francisville moves optimistically into the new decade with the hiring of a new Director of Tourism who’s actually an old hand in the industry, having spent over four decades directing some of the state’s iconic attractions.
David Floyd began his lifelong interest in history and preservation as a student at LSU’s Rural Life Museum, then headed up the staff at Kent House in Alexandria, went to Oakley Plantation of the Audubon State Historic Site for some 9 years, ran Vermilionville in Lafayette, and returned to LA State Parks in administration. Then in 1994 he was lured by his revered mentor Steele Burden to serve as director of the Rural Life Museum on property the Burden family had donated to LSU to pay tribute to vintage vernacular architecture and preserve touches of the simple life of early Louisiana.
Besides 41 years guiding and directing museums and historic tour houses, Floyd also poured his heart and soul into resurrecting his own home, found languishing in a Lettsworth cottonfield and moved painstakingly piece by piece (its lumbering trip across the Mississippi River to West Feliciana made the television news more than once) to be reconstructed in Weyanoke and rooted to the site with dependencies and landscaping that would make the late Mr. Burden beam with pride.
It was time for a new chapter; that drive from upper West Feliciana to lower East Baton Rouge was getting longer and longer. Floyd’s wife Marla called his attention to a search underway for a new director of tourism and encouraged him to apply, and so he did.

Laurie Walsh, who had served admirably in that capacity for a number of years, had just resigned to concentrate on her demanding position as St. Francisville’s Main Street director, leaving at a time when the atmosphere was finally becoming conducive to positive growth in tourism, both politically and economically.
Floyd, who began his new part-time job the first of the year, said he was looking forward to working closely with Walsh and the Town of St. Francisville. “She and the Tourist Commission did such a fabulous job,” he commented, "growing that budget from $90,000 to $200,000,” and the town itself is always very generous in promoting the entire parish. St. Francisville continues to have such a healthy combination of residential and commercial structures that give the town a 24-hour presence; young families move in for the good school system and sense of community, and older retirees appreciate the little town’s walkability and easy sense of place, while visitors from far away appreciate the small-town historic charm. With wonderful new restaurants, reinvigorated shops and B&Bs, great new hospital and library, plus lots of fun festivals and creative inspirations, it’s no wonder the local logo is “We Love It Here.”
How, Floyd surmises, do you build on that? The demographics of tourism have shifted over the years, and ecotourism is the big passion today. Younger visitors are interested in gardening, but not necessarily estate gardening. They’re interested in farm-to-table operations, birding, hiking, primitive camping, biking on rural byways. And West Feliciana has all that to offer, and more, with the Tunica Hills and Cat Island and hopefully at some point the projected Tunica Preservation Area.
Besides, Floyd says, tourism is without borders. Take what West Feliciana has and combine it, say, with Clark Creek waterfalls in Mississippi, or the Jackson/Clinton area, or the New Roads community thanks to the increasingly utilized Audubon Bridge. And perhaps have some anchors of tourism in the hinterlands, maybe in three different directions to augment town shops and restaurants and attractions: the Tunica/Weyanoke area with its unique terrain and recreational opportunities, historic plantations, Angola museum; the Oakley, Mary Ann Brown Preserve, Bluffs area with prospects of a walking/biking interpretive trail, maybe even from the river like the artist Audubon travelled in 1821; and the Laurel Hill area, with the newly donated Lemon House, St. John’s Episcopal, the old Dawson School, a state visitor center, the 24-hour truck stop casino and the old favorite South of the Border restaurant.
Tourism, he says is a wonderful combination of factors, and it certainly is considered economic development, having been the mainstay of the area’s economy for many decades after the waning of agriculture. Parish president Kenny Havard is supportive, seeing the trickle-down impact visitor spending can have on just about every business in the parish. As David Floyd sees it, tourism benefits everybody, and if you do it the right way, “you can have pleasant company and a good quality of life.” What more could you ask...
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. Several splendidly restored plantation homes are open for tours: The Cottage Plantation (weekends), Myrtles Plantation, Greenwood Plantation, plus Catalpa Plantation by reservation; Afton Villa Gardens is open in season. Particularly important to tourism in the area are its two significant state historic sites, Rosedown Plantation (a National Historic Landmark) 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.
The nearby Tunica Hills region offers unmatched recreational activities in its unspoiled wilderness areas—hiking, biking and bicycle racing due to the challenging terrain, 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 in 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 o r 225-635-4224, or St. Francisville Main Street at 225-635-3873; online www.stfrancisville.us, www.stfrancisvillefestivals.com, or www.stfrancisville.net (the events calendar gives dates and information on special activities).

St. Francisville’s Christmas In The Country

noreply@blogger.com (Blue Goose Media) — Sun, 24 Nov 2019 16:18:00 +0000

Beloved Holiday Tradition: St. Francisville’s Christmas In The Country
By Anne Butler
Rick Bragg, native of Possum Trot, Alabama, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, educator and latter-day aw-shucks humor columnist for Southern Living, confesses to being terrified of the melee and misery of Black Friday, envisioning himself yanking a discounted flat-screen TV from the death grip of a rabid granny snarling through bared teeth, before being trampled by the crazed hordes.

But holiday shopping doesn’t have to be that way, and the longtime sponsors of St. Francisville’s Christmas in the Country celebrate the season by combining great bargains on unique gifts with carols and concerts, home tours and a great parade, food and fun for all ages. This year’s festival is December 6, 7 and 8th with activities throughout the downtown area, where tiny white lights grace gallery posts and trace soaring Victorian trimwork to turn the entire National Register-listed Historic District into a veritable winter wonderland.

The theme of the Sunday afternoon Christmas parade is Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas, and it sets the tone for the whole weekend, a safe, small-town celebration of its bedrock beliefs---in the goodness of people, the beauty of nature, and the strength of community and faith. Plus it’s just plain fun! Remember when Christmas shopping was actually a pleasure? It still is in St. Francisville, where each unique little store welcomes shoppers with lots of lagniappe: refreshments, music, and spectacular discounted sales.

Friday evening, December 6th, Christmas in the Country is kicked off around St. Francisville’s Town Hall as jovial longtime mayor Billy D’Aquilla lights the town tree and hosts a reception complete with fireworks. The Polar Express Train travels along Ferdinand Street from 5 to 7:30, and participating homes along Ferdinand and Royal Streets, designated by signs, permit visitors to Peep Into Our Holiday Homes from 6 to 8 p.m. both Friday and Saturday.

A fundraising concert called Sounds Of The Season will be held to benefit the restoration of the Old Benevolent Society Building, St. Francisville’s oldest black burial insurance lodge, listed on the 2018 list of Louisiana’s Most Endangered Places. The concert features one of America’s premier bass-baritone singers, Ivan Griffin, a classically trained artist whose repertoire spans a wide range, from sacred and gospel to musical theater, jazz, opera and oratorio. The concert takes place in Grace Episcopal Church from 7:30 to 8:30 p.m., and is preceded by a reception in the church’s Jackson Hall from 6 to 7:15. (Tickets: www.eventbrite.com)

Saturday, December 7th, begins with a 7:30 a.m. Community Prayer Breakfast at the Methodist Church Fellowship Hall. Christmas on the Run supporting the American Cancer Society has a one-mile fun run beginning at 8 a.m. and a 5-K run at 8:30 a.m., both starting at Town Hall.

Little ones can enjoy Breakfast with St. Nick at Grace Church’s Jackson Hall; sponsored by the Women’s Service League, two seatings are available at 8 and 10 a.m., with reservations encouraged and tickets available online ( wslwestfel@gmail.com ).

In Parker Park from 10 to 4, over 50 unique vendors offer everything from food and music to arts and crafts; from noon to 2 there will be live music in the park featuring the Main Street Band. Also open from 10 to 4 will be a Christmas Market in Audubon Market Hall on Royal Street, with offerings from some of the other fine St. Francisville area shops not located in the downtown area.

St. Francisville’s boutique shops and art galleries are the enthusiastic sponsors of this special weekend, offering a wide variety of inventory, from antiques (there are several sprawling antiques co-ops) and art (both original and prints), decorative items, one-of-a-kind handmade crafts, custom jewelry, housewares, artisanal foodstuffs, clothing for every member of the family. Be sure to pick up your Candy Cane Shopping Card from one of the 16 listed shops, featuring discounts and “I Shopped St. Francisville” t-shirts for purchases over $100. Another fun activity for dedicated shoppers started November 22 and ends Sunday, December 8th at noon; “Find Me If You Can, I’m the Gingerbread Man” challenges shoppers to find gingerbread men at participating shops to earn a t-shirt; playing cards are available from the library or the Visitor Center/Museum.

From 10 to 4 on Saturday, the non-profit organization Friends of the Library sponsors the popular annual Tour of Homes benefitting library programs, showcasing five stately homes featuring varied architecture and eclectic décor, plus the decorated parish library and a quilt exhibit in Audubon Market Hall. Homes are scattered in the historic district, The Bluffs, and even “down some ageless tree-lined back roads.” Tickets may be purchased online at www.eventbrite.com, at the library or tour homes; info at 225-635-3364.

Downtown Merchants Open Houses, with music and refreshments, keep the fun and fine shopping going into the evening Saturday from 4 to 7 p.m. From 6 to 8 p.m., Oakley Plantation’s Jane Austen Christmas at Audubon State Historic Site features candlelight tours, seasonal decorations, food tastings and vintage dancing to period tunes. From 6 to 7 p.m. United Methodist Church hosts a Community Sing-Along. First Baptist Church (LA 10 at US 61) has a Living Nativity inside the church from 6 to 8 p.m., a real Christmas journey—travel from Nazareth to Bethlehem and rediscover the miracle of the birth of Jesus; children love the petting stable, crafts, and hot chocolate and cookies.

On Sunday, December 8th, turn in Gingerbread Man playing cards from 9 to noon at Town Hall; there will also be a photo booth there. Candy Cane Shopping Card opportunities continue from 10 to closing, with T-shirt prizes available at the Visitor Center on Ferdinand St. (open 9 to 5). Vendors are in Parker Park from 10 to 4, with live music in the park noon to 2 by Nancy Roppolo and Day Trip. The Christmas Market at Audubon Market Hall on Royal Street is also open 10 to 4.

Sunday’s highlight is the Women’s Service League Christmas Parade beginning at 2 p.m., travelling along Ferdinand and Commerce Streets, with floats, bands, marching groups, dignitaries and lots of throws, all under the theme of Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas.

Arts For All sponsors the final fabulous event of Christmas In The Country, a live concert in historic Temple Sinai featuring Clay Parker and Jodi James, the perfect acoustics making the restored place of worship a fine location for the perfect blending of voices and guitars by these two young Louisiana artists just back from a national tour. Reviewers praise their use of dense harmony-singing and subtle musical arrangements binding them to the tradition of singer-songwriters with folk and American-country roots. Tickets available at www.bontempstix.com.

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. Several splendidly restored plantation homes are open for tours: The Cottage Plantation (weekends), Myrtles Plantation, Greenwood Plantation, plus Catalpa Plantation by reservation; Afton Villa Gardens is open in season. Particularly important to tourism in the area are its two significant state historic sites, Rosedown Plantation (a National Historic Landmark) 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.

The nearby Tunica Hills region offers unmatched recreational activities in its unspoiled wilderness areas—hiking, biking and bicycle racing due to the challenging terrain, 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 in 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 o r 225-635-4224, or St. Francisville Main Street at 225-635-3873; online www.stfrancisville.us , www.stfrancisvillefestivals.com , or www.stfrancisville.net (the events calendar gives dates and information on special activities).

The Myrtles: History with a Side of Ghosts

noreply@blogger.com (Blue Goose Media) — Sat, 05 Oct 2019 00:55:00 +0000

The Myrtles: History with a Side of Ghosts
By Anne Butler

The Myrtles Plantation, originally known as Laurel Grove, was established in the late 1790s by David Bradford, wealthy judge who in 1794 represented Monongahela Valley farmers opposing an unpopular excise tax newly levied by US authorities on their corn whiskey, the principal economic product of western Pennsylvania. He was prominent and influential, although some fellow attorneys in the region considered him “mentally unstable…and lacking in judgement” according to at least one book on the revolt, which was the first test of the power of the new federal government. As one of the ringleaders of the so-called Whiskey Rebellion, elected unanimously to serve as Major General in command of the forces, Bradford escaped arrest by heading to Spanish territory (the St. Francisville area remained under Spanish control until 1810). It was he who built the north section of the house on a grant of 650 arpents.

After his death in 1808, probate records itemize an estate including land, dozens of slaves, bedsteads and feather beds, looking glasses, 155 books, two dining tables, 9 silver teaspoons and 11 silver spoons, a pair of saddle bags and a valise, two swords, cotton cards and weavers’ loom and spinning wheels, one gig and harness, horses, oxen, hogs, ploughs and carpenters’ tools, geese and ducks and sheep, guns and ladies’ saddles, 730 barrels of corn, 1,000 pounds of seed cotton, and more. His widow Elizabeth retained most of the farming implements and livestock, household furnishings and some of the slaves, who were divided among the descendants with an apparent attempt to keep families together (“Three Negroes viz Bill, Miny his wife and their Child Maria, were offered for sale and being repeatedly cried were adjudged to Jane Speer with the consent of Henry Q. Speer her husband for the sum of $3060”).

Among David Bradford’s immediate heirs were a number who met with tragedy in life. His daughter Sophia in 1818 married the apparently unrelated James Morgan Bradford; an attorney who served in Capt. Jedediah Smith’s Feliciana Troop of Horse in the Battle of New Orleans before establishing the first newspaper published in the Florida Parishes of Louisiana, he was stabbed to death in 1837 during a quarrel with John McDermott. David Bradford’s son and namesake, born in 1796, married the sister of Jefferson Davis and was assassinated in 1844; he too had served in Capt. Smith’s cavalry.

The Myrtles was next occupied by Bradford’s daughter Sarah Mathilda, who in 1817 at age 16 married 38-year-old Judge Clark Woodruff, who had been a corporal in the Feliciana Troop of Horse. It was they who added the ornate grape-cluster wrought-iron grillwork to the lengthy front gallery. After yellow fever epidemics in 1823 and 1824 killed Woodruff’s wife and young son and daughter, he sold the property, along with improvements and slaves, for $46,853.17 to Ruffin Gray Stirling in 1834. Audubon’s pupil Eliza’s mother Lucretia Alston Pirrie’s first husband was Ruffin Gray of Oakley Plantation; her sister Ann Alston was the wife of early settler Alexander Stirling, and their son, born in 1795, was named Ruffin Gray Stirling for his uncle.
In the 1850s Stirling, a wealthy cotton planter who farmed thousands of acres, and his wife, Mary Catherine Cobb, added the large central hallway and southern section, doubling the size of the house; skilled European craftsmen formalized the rooms with faux bois and elaborate pierced friezework, the plaster a mixture of clay, Spanish moss and cattle or deer hair. In June 1852 their 19-year-old daughter Sarah Mulford Stirling married William Drew Winter at The Myrtles.

William Winter had been born in Bath, Maine, in 1820, a direct descendent of pilgrim John Alden. His father was a ship captain who drowned when William was 15, his first wife died in childbirth, and misfortune seemed to follow William all his life.

One fine day in August of 1856, just four years after his marriage at The Myrtles, he boarded the steamer Star bound for Last Island, popular with south Louisiana’s plantation families and residents of the Crescent City escaping deadly yellow fever epidemics amidst the healthful sea breezes. Just off the Louisiana coast, Isle Dernier was a fashionable Victorian resort with summer cottages and a small hotel, fine fishing and sea bathing, and broad sand beaches for promenading and carriage riding.

Aboard the Star, attorney William D. Winter approached the island just as Louisiana’s first great hurricane arrived unheralded from the opposite direction. Devastating winds and strong surf inundated the lowlying island from both gulf and bay sides, with houses collapsing and shrieking residents washed out to sea. The crippled Star, its anchor chains snapped, was very nearly swept past the island to perish in gulf waters, but as the captain struggled to dock, the vessel bilged in the sand near the highest point of the island.

One of the heroes of the disaster would be William Winter, who arrived in time to see the collapse of the island hotel where numerous guests and visitors had taken refuge. With his colleague Dr. Jones Lyle, Winter leapt from the foundering steamboat into the raging waters and rushed into the shattered hotel to save scores of men, women and children, leading them to the terrapin pens, sturdy enclosures holding turtles destined for the dining table. Then, during a brief calm in the midst of the storm, the men formed a human chain stretching toward the foundered Star and led their two dozen charges from the neck-deep waters of the terrapin pens to the safety of the boat’s hull.

Winter and Lyle were both known as great gourmets, and at one point during the frantic struggle, as they watched hundred-pound turtles swimming around the trapped survivors and being washed out to sea, Winter wryly commented on how many good dinners were being lost.

William Winter and his wife Sarah Stirling would have six children. An attorney, he served as agent for his widowed mother-in-law’s extensive properties, but the prosperous days of the Cotton Kingdom were over, and by 1867 William D. Winter had to declare bankruptcy. However, after a tax sale, the title to The Myrtles was transferred to his wife Sarah, and the family was still in residence on the tragic day in January 1871 when William Drew Winter met his end, according to Grace Episcopal Church records, “shot at his own door 26 Jan. at half past seven o’clock.”

Winter was said to have been teaching a son his Sunday School lessons in the front room at The Myrtles when he heard someone outside calling his name. He went out onto the front gallery and there he was shot dead with a double-barrel shotgun, “six buckshot taking effect in his breast.” His stunned family inside heard the shooting, followed by the sound of horse’s hooves clattering off into the distance.

Winter was buried in Grace Church cemetery the following day, and newspapers during this turbulent Reconstruction era recount the unsuccessful prosecution of former sheriff E.L. Weber and George Swayze for the murder. There had been disagreements over cotton and several lawsuits between Weber and Winter, and the coroner testified to hearing Weber make use of “unfriendly expressions” toward the deceased. The court affirmed that Winter was “foully and maliciously assassinated in cold blood…an outrageous dastardly act that struck terror to the hearts of every man, woman and child in this entire community. To be thus shot down in the vigor of manhood, in the floodtide of prosperity, conspicuous among men for his brilliant talents and attainments, eminent as an attorney and counselor at the bar of this State, at his own fireside, in the very bosom of his family.” But the first judge recused himself, the State’s witnesses could not be found and, although jailhouse conversations seemed to implicate the two defendants, the presiding Judge acquitted them both.

The Myrtles capitalizes wonderfully on its own woeful past, and on dark evenings with moonlight trickling down through the hanging moss, it looks downright scary. Sticklers for historical accuracy might regard as more entertainment than fact the scintillating and ever-changing stories that captivate and terrify tourists on popular mystery tours through a house billed as the most haunted in America-- the slave Chloe wearing a green tignon to cover the ear whacked off as punishment for eavesdropping, the tiny tots poisoned by oleander baked into a birthday cake, the slain Confederate soldiers and stabbings over gambling debts, the illicit affairs between master and slave, the disturbed Indian burial mound and the unquiet spirits captured in discolored mirrors. But the murder at The Myrtles of William Drew Winter is another story altogether, and one well-grounded in historical fact.

From the 1890s to the 1950s The Myrtles had a succession of owners, including Harrison Williams who’d gone to the Civil War as a 15-year-old Confederate cavalry courier and was the last to actually raise crops on the place. Today this popular tourist destination, owned since 1992 by John E. and Teeta Moss who have recently handed over the responsibility to son Morgan, has taken on a new focus, more of a destination area complete with dining in the new 1796 Restaurant, B&B in the main house or shotgun cottages, bricked courtyard to the rear and tidy parterre garden leading to the front entrance. There are daily tours through the historic house, specialized mystery tours, and enormously popular Halloween Experience extravaganza tours on weekends in October (Friday, Saturday and Sunday 5 to 10 p.m.) guaranteed to scare the pants off visitors. Advance reservations are suggested and may be made online or by calling 800-809-0565 or 225-635-6277.

Other events commemorating Halloween are Trunk or Treat at the West Feliciana Sports Park on October 24th, downtown trick or treating on Halloween sponsored by Main Street and the local merchants, and All Hallows Eve at Audubon State Historic Site on Friday, October 25, from 6 to 8 p.m., a traditional 1800s fall festival with storytelling, pumpkin carving, apple bobbing, superstitions, divinations and games for the whole family (for information, call 888-677-2838 toll free or 225-635-3739).

One of the area’s iconic events, a fall tradition for gardening enthusiasts across the south organized in tribute to the glorious 19th-century gardens still extant in the St. Francisville area, is the Southern Garden Symposium October 18 and 19th, when nationally renowned speakers conduct programs in plantation settings including Rosedown, Afton Villa and historic churches on Friday; a Saturday symposium at Hemingbough features outstanding lectures, autographed gardening books and tools. For information and ticket information, online southerngardensymposium@gmail.com.

Other October events drawing visitors to the St. Francisville area include the Angola Rodeo and Craft Show every Sunday, and the popular Yellow Leaf Festival in St. Francisville’s oak-shaded Parker Park on October 27 and 28, featuring lots of carefully curated art works as well as continuous live music and good food.
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. Several splendidly restored plantation homes are open for tours: The Cottage Plantation (weekends), Myrtles Plantation, Greenwood Plantation, plus Catalpa Plantation by reservation; Afton Villa Gardens is open in season. Particularly important to tourism in the area are its two significant state historic sites, Rosedown Plantation (a National Historic Landmark) 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.

The nearby Tunica Hills region offers unmatched recreational activities in its unspoiled wilderness areas—hiking, biking and bicycle racing due to the challenging terrain, 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 in 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 o r 225-635-4224, or St. Francisville Main Street at 225-635-3873; online www.stfrancisville.us, www.stfrancisvillefestivals.com, or www.stfrancisville.net (the events calendar gives dates and information on special activities).

St. Francisville’s Rosedown Plantation State Historic Site: Story of Survival

noreply@blogger.com (Blue Goose Media) — Wed, 28 Aug 2019 02:19:00 +0000

St. Francisville’s Rosedown Plantation State Historic Site: Story of Survival
By Anne Butler

“Of all the houses in the world it seemed to be the beloved of its own trees and gardens,” said Mississippi-born writer Stark Young when he used Rosedown as a picturesque setting in his acclaimed Civil War novel So Red The Rose, written a full century after Rosedown was built in 1834. That charm and appeal continues unabated today, the house folded in the embrace of 27 surrounding acres of 19th-century gardens and live oaks grown to immense size, and indeed the beauty of the glorious gardens has saved the house itself more than once through the generations.

In 1829 Martha Hilliard Barrow and her husband Daniel Turnbull acquired the Rosedown property from the estate of her father for $60,000; the couple had married in 1828 when Martha was 18 years old and Daniel 28. Here they would erect a stately double-galleried home, all 8,000 square feet of it costing a mere $13,109.20 and completed in just six months, November 1, 1834, to May 1, 1835.
Much of the labor was performed by slaves during the winter months when planting chores were few. Built of cypress cut from the surrounding woods, the Rosedown house featured Doric columns, double galleries, and a fanlight over the entrance doorway to remind the mistress of her own homeplace, Highland; its style was called transitional Federal Greek Revival. The “workmanship and stile (was) not to be surpassed in the state,” according to the contract with carpenter W. Wright, who had been a contractor for the West Feliciana Railroad, the country’s first standard-gauge line.

The young bride planned a housewarming party for only some thirty guests, but the menu included 6 chickens for chicken salad, 2 turkeys, 2 ducks, 1 ham, 1 tongue, 1 roast mutton, 2 roast chickens, 1 pig, cakes made from 12 dozen eggs, 6 eggs for salad, 16 pints for cream, jelly, blancmange, 23 bananas, 6 pineapples, 2 hogsheads ice, 4 decanters wine, 4 decanters brandy, 2 bottles brandy, 8 bottles champagne, 4 pounds candy fruit, 2 ornamental pound cakes of 12 pounds each, 1 10-pound fruitcake, macaronas, lady fingers, 1 jar grapes, 2 neuga ornaments; “costs 74 dollars, musicians 60 dollars, indeed to induce everything it cost 224 dollars.”

On their lengthy wedding trip through Europe in 1835, Martha fell in love with Versailles and other great landscapes of the Continent and gleaned the inspiration for her own grand gardens. Only such expansive yet orderly grandeur could adequately complement the fine plantation house. Initially five acres of rare shrubs on each side of the avenue, the Rosedown plantings were continually expanded into one of the great gardens of the 19th century and early proving grounds for the exotic flora of the Orient.

Camellia japonicas, for example, planted at Rosedown as early as the 1830s or ‘40s, were natives of the Orient and Far East, known to thrive in the gardens of Japan and China centuries before they were seen by Europeans. They were initially carried to other lands by missionaries and early medical men, travelling first afoot and then across the seas after trade with the Orient was first opened in the early 1500s by the Portuguese and their infamous Black Ships. Soon trading groups like the East India Companies were formed, dealing in spices, silks, porcelains and other Oriental treasures. It was often the medical officers of these trade companies who first studied the native plants for their medicinal propensities, then introduced the botanical oddities back home.

The gardening journals of Martha Turnbull are a testament to the importance of plantings in early southern life and the amazing variety of not just ornamental but also edible plants she set out…eggplants and tomatoes, turnips, cabbage and lettuce, celery, broccoli, beets and spinach, parsnips, carrots, kale, leeks, potatoes, garlic, onions planted at the full moon, peas, dewberries and raspberries, beans, watermelons, cucumbers and cantaloupe, cauliflower, squash, rutabaga, figs and pears and apples, quince and peaches, plums, artichokes, pineapples in the greenhouse, tobacco and rice.

Here along the Lower Mississippi River where more than half of America’s 19th-century millionaires were to be found before the Civil War, Daniel Turnbull acquired additional lands for an extensive cotton operation. His more practical journal of cash crops and work details, preserved in the LSU Department of Archives and Manuscripts, includes such entries as: “Shipped 308 Bales; killed 20 hogs, weather cold; Rosedown gin running, 6 hands digging holes for trees in orchard; teams hauled pork from landing; 6 men cut up and salted hogs, 4 men whipsawing; heavy freeze last night; new smokehouse, new woodhouse; carpenters and 2 men in the swamp getting out timber for new cabins, 2 ox teams hauled the same, 7 hands worked in orchard, 5 men pressed 14 bales in Rosedown gin.” In 1860 a New Orleans newspaper called West Feliciana one of the richest parishes in the state, and among the largest planters were mentioned Daniel Turnbull of Rosedown and William J. Fort of Catalpa.

The Turnbulls’ seven-year-old son James Daniel died in 1843 of yellow fever, and their grown son William, who with his wife Caroline S. Butler had several children, drowned in the river while herding cattle. Their only daughter Sarah, beautiful “National Belle” of 1849, married James Pirrie Bowman, the son of Audubon’s pupil Eliza Pirrie of Oakley. Sarah was the center of brilliant entertainments and social life at Rosedown prior to her marriage, making the rounds of resorts, dancing the night away at fancy dress balls, touring Europe, and excelling at athletics as well. One account, written later by one of her daughters, tells the story of Sarah in attendance at drills at West Point on horseback when an officer dared her to take a hurdle. A fearless equestrienne, she sat erect and replied, “A Southern girl was never known to refuse a dare,” and gracefully leaped the hurdle. The cadets saluted her and the band played Dixie in her honor. It would be her eight daughters, four of them spinsters, who would struggle to maintain Rosedown after the Civil War through some very lean and difficult years.
In one particularly poignant scene from So Red The Rose, a Confederate cavalryman rides along the 660-foot oak allee from the plantation house based on Rosedown, tipping his hat to each of the marble statues lining the drive, a final farewell to a vanishing way of life. And indeed life would never be the same at Rosedown, and yet the plantation persevered through struggling years of genteel poverty. After 30 years of recording daily experiments and plantings with unlimited labor and funds, the diaries of Mrs. Turnbull dolefully record the disintegration of the gardens into melancholy wildernesses of sedgegrass during the difficult years of the Civil War, while she tried to save them by paying the help with plantation produce and often working by their side.

Wartime diary entries show the determination of Martha Turnbull, who had been mistress of hundreds of slaves, to do whatever it took to save her garden: “Julia one week at 40 cents…Penny and Lancaster 2 days each, $1.60…Penny cleaning front yard, gave her 2 lbs. coffee, 2 lbs. sugar, pint molasses…Ben hawled all leaves from the Avenue…Kitty and children cleaned up with Clabber paying.” The entry of January 1864 reads, “Up to this time, since the Federals landed in May neither field or Garden has been worked.” In January 1869: “Not one speck of ground yet plowed. Hay all over the truck patch & no manure yet hawled…all work that ought to have been in October and November yet to be done…Very cold & damp-deep snow today-can do nothing-no hands yet in garden but John Prenter & he’s worse than nothing.” And times worsened: “August 23…cleaned up my yard entirely by my own hands and now hawling manure and trash from Eliza’s side,” reads one entry in 1872.

In 1874 she initiated a Civil War claim for property confiscated by Union forces in June of 1863, including 300 hogsheads sugar, 600 barrels molasses, 200 mules, 100 horses, 700 head of cattle, 80 wagons, 300 hogs, 6,000 bushels of corn, 50 bales of cotton, 100 barrels of pork, 3000 pounds of salted meat and 20 sacks of coffee. She never received compensation. And yet annual inventories of household items like the one of August 1867 still show remarkable treasures: “24 fingerbowls, 11 flower and 13 dark blue; 24 breakfast forks; 24 dinner forks; 1 asparagus knife; 1 buckwheat knife; 1 custard spoon; 1 gravy spoon; 21 teaspoons; 6 STB coffee spoons; 6 egg spoons; 17 dessert spoons; 17 dinner spoons; 1 cheese knife; 1 cake knife; 2 salt spoons; 1 sugar tongs; 2 butter knives; 12 nut picks; 1 sugar sifter; 23 fruit forks; 24 fruit knives; 1 fish knife; 16 old things in drawer; 6 nut crackers; 1 ham hock; 1 crumb brush…” Census of the labor force and of the animals from the same era, compared with the claim for property confiscated by federal troops, shows the decline: “40 sheep, 2 bulls, 1 old and 1 young, 6 oxen” and “little negroes 105, hands 248, no accounts 12.”
On September 1, 1895, Martha Barrow Turnbull entered her last posting in her garden journal: “My pension came. I had not one dime to pay Emma $2 this month, August or any debt whatever.” Her pension, as a widow of a veteran of the War of 1812, was a monthly check of $8.

Martha Turnbull died at age 87 in 1896, her daughter Sarah, mother of ten, in 1914. The slim Bowman sisters of the next generation, spinsters Corrie, Isabel, Sarah and Nina, inherited the place and all its accompanying responsibilities at the worst possible time, as the boll weevil destroyed the cotton empire upon which the house was built; the parishwide harvest of 1853 had been 24,000 bales, but by the early 1900s only 400 bales of cotton were harvested in West Feliciana. But the sisters did the best they could, selling poultry and cuttings of garden plants, and timidly offering postcards for 25 cents to inquisitive tourists who were allowed in to the house to see only the parlor and dining room.

It would be the gardens that touched the hearts of the Milton Underwoods from Texas when the plantation home and acreage were put up for sale after the last of the Bowman sisters, Miss Nina, died in mid-1955. The detailed gardening diaries of Martha Turnbull span nearly 60 years and prove that she was one of the first to introduce azaleas and camellias to the South beginning in 1836. These records were invaluable restoration tools when oil heiress Catherine Fondren Underwood, after attending a Garden Clubs of America event in Natchez, purchased the property in 1956, her keen eye recognizing the lush beauty of the gardens and haunting dignity of the house even through the creeping undergrowth and peeling plaster.

Prior to opening to the public, a meticulous 10-year restoration, overseen by noted New Orleans architects Richard Koch and George Leake and landscape architect Ralph Gunn of Houston who was succeeded by Dr. Neil G. Odenwald, salvaged the house and its unique collection of plantings. A 1930s WPA architect’s survey of Rosedown aided immeasurably in the location of paths, potting shed, conservatory and greenhouse. Century-old sweet olives, cypress, camellias, azaleas, and other flowering shrubs and trees were preserved, and a propagation program regenerated old-fashioned roses, rare hip gardenias with their seed pods glowing like bright orange lanterns, and lace-cap hydrangeas from the original 19th-century stock.

For decades Rosedown was the strong draw for tourism in St. Francisville, nationally recognized, well publicized, admired by preservationists and gardening enthusiasts for its attention to historical accuracy, a generous community partner for the entire area. But after the death of the Underwoods, the house with several thousand surrounding acres was purchased in 1994 for $3.75 million by a most unfortunate owner, who sold the cattle, sold the timber, sold some of the property, removed the marble statues lining the avenue, replaced knowledgeable tour guides with audiotapes and made visitors look through plexiglass rather than entering the rooms at an exorbitant entrance fee which generated tremendous ill will. He divided and sold the enormous Gothic Revival Henry Clay bedroom suite for which an entire wing had been added to one side of the main structure, balanced on the opposite side by a library; Daniel Turnbull purchased the immense set, which had been ordered for use in the White House, after Clay lost his bid for the presidency in 1844. The bed alone was sold to the Dallas Museum of Art for $450,000, matching side chairs went to Houston’s Bayou Bend museum, while the dresser, wash stands, massive armoire and cheval mirror went in different directions. Other purported contents of the house, seemingly everything that wasn’t nailed down, were sold at auction on the grounds, where local preservationists tried to purchase what they could so the items could be returned to Rosedown.

He even tried to evict the little black Rosedown Baptist Church, on property well removed from the main house, given to the congregation way back in time and surrounded by a cemetery. That threat caused outrage in the entire community. Eventually the one-acre church property was purchased by an anonymous local resident and the deed handed over to the rector, the Reverend Lafayette Veal, Jr., a heartwarming recognition that any appreciation of area history and heritage must of necessity include the major contributions of black community members and of the importance of black churches to life through the generations. Rev. Veal, whose father pastored the church before him, recalled the night Rosedown’s new owner came to break the bad news to the congregation: “I was thinking and praying at the same time, ‘What is wrong with this man?’ Then it came to me: Satan is in our midst.”

Maybe it could have been worse. Sotheby’s International Realty had listed the property---2100 acres of woodlands, pasture, gardens and plantation house, with this sales pitch: “Currently maintained as a museum, Rosedown Plantation is well suited for a number of possible uses such as a hunt club, horse or cattle farm, private school, spa/health club, hotel/restaurant or residential development.”

Finally the State of Louisiana stepped in and purchased the house, gardens and close to 400 acres for $5.7 million in November 2000. Today Rosedown, magnificently furnished and now a State Historic Site and National Historic Landmark, represents one of the South’s finest examples of antebellum culture, a picture of life along the River Road during the Cotton Kingdom. Rosedown’s grand gardens remain one of few extant 19th-century gardens in America. Rows of live oaks form a vaulted canopy above the entrance allee, considered one of the most beautiful approaches in the South. On the grounds, a compelling collection of original outbuildings—barn, plantation doctor’s office, milk house, latticed gazebos—provide further understanding of the operations of the early plantation communities, and here Rosedown’s staff periodically demonstrates early plantation skills like down-hearth cooking in the detached kitchen, using actual recipes from the Turnbull family and their descendants.

One of the area’s iconic events, a fall tradition for gardening enthusiasts across the south organized in tribute to the glorious 19th-century gardens still extant in the St. Francisville area, is the Southern Garden Symposium October 18 and 19th, when nationally renowned speakers conduct programs in plantation settings including Rosedown, Afton Villa and historic churches on Friday; a Saturday symposium at Hemingbough features outstanding lectures, autographed gardening books and tools. For information and ticket information, online southerngardensymposium@gmail.com.

Other fall events drawing visitors to the St. Francisville area include the Feliciana Hummingbird Festival at the National Wildbird Refuge in Tunica on September 15, the Angola Rodeo and Craft Show every Sunday in October, the popular Yellow Leaf Festival in Parker Park on the 27th and 28th of October, and the Myrtles Plantation Halloween Experience weekends throughout October.

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. Several splendidly restored plantation homes are open for tours: The Cottage Plantation (weekends), Myrtles Plantation, Greenwood Plantation, plus Catalpa Plantation by reservation; Afton Villa Gardens is open in season. Particularly important to tourism in the area are its two significant state historic sites, Rosedown Plantation (a National Historic Landmark) 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.

The nearby Tunica Hills region offers unmatched recreational activities in its unspoiled wilderness areas—hiking, biking and bicycle racing due to the challenging terrain, 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 in 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 o r 225-635-4224, or St. Francisville Main Street at 225-635-3873; online www.stfrancisville.us, www.stfrancisvillefestivals.com, or www.stfrancisville.net (the events calendar gives dates and information on special activities).

Vibes in the ‘Ville

noreply@blogger.com (Blue Goose Media) — Sun, 04 Aug 2019 03:41:00 +0000

Vibes in the ‘Ville
By Anne Butler

It was the summer of love, fifty years ago, when a music festival drew 400,000 hippies to a rolling farm in upstate New York to hear the top musicians of the day. Now the popular August festival that was originally called Polos and Pearls, designed to extend shop hours into the cool of the evening even in the heat of summer, steps up the pace with a decidedly funky feel.

Renamed Vibes in the ‘Ville, this year’s event promises lots of fun as it celebrates the 50th anniversary of Woodstock on August 17 from 4 to 7 p.m. in downtown St. Francisville, with shop extended hours and specials, tram transports, plus live music and vendors in Parker Park. A special live tribute performance of Sounds of Woodstock will round out the reminiscing from 7 to 10 p.m .
Temple Design has created spectacular tie-dyed t-shirts, available in most shops, designed to encourage attendees, especially those old enough to remember the first Woodstock, to keep their clothes on! Shoppers have the opportunity to register for door prizes at each shop, and winners’ names will be pulled at Parker Park after 7 p.m.

That first Woodstock, on August 15-18, 1969, at Max Yasgur’s 600-acre dairy farm, proved to be a pivotal moment for popular music and the counterculture generation, marked by “a sense of social harmony, outstanding music, and bohemian behavior,” whatever that might be.

It was also marked by a few births and deaths (one overdose and one poor fan sleeping in a field and run over by a tractor), pouring rain and mud, nudity and traffic jams and wall-to-wall people, but oh, the music! Thirty-two top recording artists: Jimi Hendrix, Richie Havens and Arlo Guthrie, Joan Baez, Country Joe McDonald and Santana, John Sebastian, The Grateful Dead, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Joe Cocker, Country Joe and the Fish, The Band, Crosby Stills Nash and Young, Blood Sweat and Tears.

Even Roy Rogers was invited to close the festival with “Happy Trails,” but he declined, and a few groups like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones had other commitments.
They billed the original Woodstock as “An Aquarian Exposition—Three Days of Peace and Music.” Vibes in the ‘Ville will be a single afternoon and evening, with great bargains in all the unique boutique shops and co-ops in St. Francisville’s Historic District and outlying areas, great music in the park, and hopefully no nudity or births or deaths, but you never know… And as the sun dips below the horizon and fireflies flit in the cooling dusk, Roy Rogers will again decline to sing “Happy Trails,” so happy shoppers loaded down with bargain purchases can just hum it to themselves.

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. Severa; splendidly restored plantation homes are open for tours: The Cottage Plantation (weekends), Myrtles Plantation, Greenwood Plantation, plus Catalpa Plantation by reservation; Afton Villa Gardens is open in season. Particularly important to tourism in the area are its two significant state historic sites, Rosedown Plantation (a National Historic Landmark) 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.

The nearby Tunica Hills region offers unmatched recreational activities in its unspoiled wilderness areas—hiking, biking and bicycle racing due to the challenging terrain, 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 in 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 www.stfrancisvillefestivals.com, www.stfrancisville.net or www.stfrancisville.us (the events calendar gives dates and information on special activities).

Oakley Plantation inspired artist J.J. Audubon to Greatness

noreply@blogger.com (Blue Goose Media) — Mon, 15 Jul 2019 02:33:00 +0000

Oakley Plantation inspired artist J.J. Audubon to Greatness
By Anne Butler
Established on a 1799 Spanish land grant of 600 acres to Ruffin Gray, Oakley Plantation is fascinating in its own right, not just because of its close associations with artist John James Audubon, who in 1821 was hired to tutor the 15-year-old daughter of the plantation in dancing, music, drawing, math and French, plus domestic skills like hair plaiting.
Gray’s wife Lucretia Alston was the daughter of John Alston. who had obtained large land grants from the British near Natchez. When the Spanish governor of Louisiana ousted the English, Alston led an unsuccessful revolt in 1781 and then fled for his life. Sending his wife and three small children overland to safety, Alston was captured and imprisoned. His wife was killed when her horse fell during the flight, but the children were hidden in a one-room cabin on a friend’s Pointe Coupee plantation, cared for by a faithful family retainer named Mammy Patt. At least that’s the family tradition, and in John Alston’s will there is grateful mention of Mammy Patt; other versions place Lucretia in a convent school in New Orleans until her father’s release.

The Oakley house was planned as a simple, sensible structure of colonial architectural style as adapted to the southern climate; originally it had divided Spanish-style steps to the raised front gallery and predated the grand Greek Revival architecture of the mid-19th century. It was a splendid West Indies-style three-story-plus-attic structure, with double galleries shaded by jalousies to block the harsh hot sunlight while permitting cool breezes to blow through the rooms, all of which opened to the outside. Exterior stairways and an interior one on a back gallery long enclosed have such narrow treads that one resident family member called Oakley “a house for warm weather and little feet.”

Lots of live oaks were planted to eventually provide the shade which would make Louisiana summers bearable. But Ruffin Gray would not live to see the fruits of his labor. He died within a year, and in 1801 his widow married millwright James Pirrie of Scottish descent and moved into the Oakley house when it was completed.

It was the focal point of a plantation that was well established by the time Irish-born traveler Fortescue Cuming visited the area in 1809. In his travelogue “Sketches of a Tour to the Western Country,” Cuming records a visit to the Pirries’ fine plantation, with a hundred slaves “and the best garden I had yet seen in this country.” He was somewhat less enthralled by local culinary practices, finding gumbo “a most awkward dish for a stranger,” the okra making it “so ropy and slimy as to make it difficult with either knife, spoon or fork, to carry it to the mouth, without the plate and mouth being connected by a long string.”
By 1824, records show that the Pirries had 5,656 acres planted in cotton and owned 106 slaves. They could well afford to hire a live-in tutor for daughter Eliza. Feliciana planters and their families often travelled by steamboat to New Orleans--on business to check with cotton factors about the sale of crops, or for social events and carnival season, or purely for pleasure and shopping. It was on such a trip to the Crescent City that Lucretia Alston Pirrie came into contact with the struggling artist Audubon and offered him temporary employment at Oakley as tutor for young Eliza.

Like all early plantations, Oakley is illustrative of the interconnections of homes and families. Audubon’s pupil Eliza Pirrie would marry three times. Her first marriage was an 1823 elopement, encouraged by secret romantic correspondences like the following, written on May 7, 1823: “My dear Eliza, The situation in which we are both placed is a sufficient apology for my adopting this method of making a communication to you ...I have borne with much patience the many and constant attempts, and apparent incessant watchfulness, to prevent any intercourse between us...You know Eliza there is but one way of avoiding and defeating this opposition—Your own feelings are the best prompting, in your making a decision on that point. It becomes necessary that we should throw away all reserve in our feelings, and embrace every and any opportunity that offers, for a safe conveyance of our feelings...A Few words would be gratefully received by one whose heart and its affections are, Truly thine, Rob. H. Barrow.”

And so, despite parental objections, Eliza eloped with her dashing 28-year-old cousin Robert Hilliard Barrow of Greenwood Plantation, who would not live to see 29; he contracted pneumonia, supposedly while carrying his young bride across the flooded Homochitto Bayou on their honeymoon, and died six weeks later; born posthumously, his son would carry on his name. Eliza’s last marriage was to an attorney disparaged by her friends as “a trifling sponge,” lured away by the Mexican War and the 1849 Gold Rush, and not even present when she died of childbed fever in 1851.

It was Eliza’s second marriage in 1828, to the eminently respectable first rector of Grace Episcopal Church, which produced the descendants who were still struggling to keep both Rosedown and Oakley Plantations going into the 20th century. Her son James Pirrie Bowman married the beautiful Sarah Turnbull of Rosedown where they made their home and had a large family which included eight daughters, and Eliza’s daughter Isabelle Bowman married William Wilson Matthews and remained at Oakley.

It was in 1947 when a few determined dowagers of West Feliciana, namely the Misses Mamie and Sarah Butler along with Mrs. James Leake Stirling of the Alexander Stirling Chapter of the DAR, persuaded the state of Louisiana to purchase Oakley. Courtly longtime state representative Davis Folkes, called the Dean of the Legislature, pushed it through. The property was in dire need of attention, but its historic connections with Audubon cried out for preservation as a state property accessible to the travelling public.

There was no running water or electricity inside when the state acquired the house and 100 acres of land for $10,000 from the unmarried grandchildren of Eliza Pirrie through her daughter Isabelle. The last resident heirs, Ida and Lucy Matthews, had done the best they could, but massive restoration work was required. Garden clubs, Colonial Dames, Daughters of the American Revolution and other groups as well as interested individuals generously provided help with furnishings and landscaping.

Mrs. Stirling served as the first curator, but longstanding disputes over park management led to her resignation at a time when the state auctioned off many of the home’s contents, property of the original Pirrie and Matthews generations, at very little profit. The Division of Administration noted the two auctions brought in little more than $1,000 for some 36 items of furniture. A half-tester bed went for $15, an armoire for $15.50, a piano for $25, a sideboard $15, 5 Eastlake chairs $26.25, and an entire bedroom suite of mahogany furniture including a tester bed for $186. A rocking chair was eventually sold for 50 cents.

Popular today as the central focus of the Audubon State Historic Site for more than half a century, Oakley has been beautifully restored and carefully furnished in the late Federal style of 1790-1830, reflecting the appearance of the home when Audubon was in residence. On the ground level is the brick-floored dining room, the second floor was the main living space with central parlor, and bedrooms took up the third floor.
Oakley was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1973. The West Feliciana Historical Society sponsors an Audubon Pilgrimage celebrating the artist’s stay, and Oakley is always a popular part of this annual event, with visitors especially appreciating seeing the tiny bedroom where Audubon himself slept and worked during his summer sojourn in what he called his ornithological paradise, a significant period that altered the course of his life.

Within its hundred wooded acres are the detached plantation kitchen reconstructed on original foundations around the early chimney and containing a weaving room and wash room; a barn full of horse-drawn vehicles and farm implements; and several rustic slave cabins. These dependencies are periodically utilized to augment the house tour with demonstrations of old-time practical skills and fascinating living-history events, many catering to school groups. Oakley also has a picnic pavilion, hiking trails and extremely interesting visitor center/museum.

Old houses are bottomless pits, and there’s never enough funding for preservation. A lengthy lead-abatement project and general sprucing up have recently been completed at Oakley, but the current goal of the state parks hierarchy is for all state sites to be self-supporting, not entirely unreasonable but perhaps not entirely realistic either for some sites. Private-public partnerships are being explored in hopes cooperative endeavors might help.

Oakley’s sister state historic site, Rosedown Plantation, has higher head counts of visitors, being closer to town within easy reach of bus tours full of steamboat passengers, and has also leased unused fields for row-crop farming. Rosedown is open daily except holidays; Oakley, at one point in danger of being closed completely, is now open only five days weekly.

Possibilities being discussed for enhancing Oakley’s appeal include an on-site micro-distillery (in a non-historic storage building) that might convince Mississippi River boat tours to include the place on itineraries as passengers disembark to explore the historic Felicianas. Would this be appropriate? Audubon, of course, was not a drinker other than his morning grog, but recall his observation of Squire Pirrie as “when sober, a good man,” and he also records an occasion when he was awakened to accompany Mrs. Pirrie to the home of a dying neighbor: “We went, but arrived rather late, for Mr. James O’Connor was dead. I had the displeasure of keeping his body’s company the remainder of the night...the poor man had drunk himself literally into an everlasting sleep; peace to his soul.” Ever the artist, Audubon continued, “I made a good sketch of his head...”

Perhaps straight history is no longer sufficient to command the interest of tourists, so that plantations must now become commercial resorts embellished with restaurants and spirits, even thousands of inmates at the former plantation now serving as the state penitentiary which has become the most unlikely of tourist attractions. But there are also properties of such incredible historic significance that care must be taken not to detract from what they have to teach us.

Highlight of the summer social season in St. Francisville is the seventh annual Wags & Whiskers Gala at Hemingbough on Saturday, July 27, 2019, from 6 to 9 p.m. This is the West Feliciana Animal Humane Society’s primary fundraiser for the local animal shelter, offering finger foods and cash bar, dancing to the Delta Drifters, silent auction, bargains on gift cards and wine, kissing booth, and a parade of prospective pets from the shelter. Tickets are available at bontempstix.com or at the Bank of St. Francisville.

The James L. “Bo” Bryant Animal Shelter opened in 2012 and is as close to no-kill as you can get. The dedicated volunteers and staff have cared for a total of 2,055 dogs and cats (plus the occasional horse or pig) since computerized record-keeping began in 2014, and of that number, permanent homes were found for 1,573, over 90%. Many lost pets are reunited with owners, sometimes years later thanks to implanted chips. The shelter also has some crackerjack volunteer photographers, whose appealing portraits led a California couple to adopt homely hounddog Ole Red and fly all the way to Louisiana to get him. And then there is Rowdy, Catahoula mix turned school therapy dog and unlikely current “cover girl” for the “Dog Days of Summer” issue of Baton Rouge’s social commentator In-Register magazine!

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. Severa; splendidly restored plantation homes are open for tours: The Cottage Plantation (weekends), Myrtles Plantation, Greenwood Plantation, plus Catalpa Plantation by reservation; Afton Villa Gardens is open in season. Particularly important to tourism in the area are its two significant state historic sites, Rosedown Plantation (a National Historic Landmark) 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.

The nearby Tunica Hills region offers unmatched recreational activities in its unspoiled wilderness areas—hiking, biking and bicycle racing due to the challenging terrain, 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 in 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 www.stfrancisvillefestivals.com, www.stfrancisville.net or www.stfrancisville.us (the events calendar gives dates and information on special activities).

St. Francisville’s Amazing Grace

noreply@blogger.com (Blue Goose Media) — Wed, 12 Jun 2019 14:48:00 +0000

St. Francisville’s Amazing Grace
By Anne Butler

St. Francisville is a beautiful little island of English reserve and decorum in the midst of a state filled with Mardi Gras madness and Catholic confessions. It’s not French. It’s not Creole. It’s not Cajun. So it’s no wonder that the early church in St. Francisville proper, claimed by the French and settled under Spanish rule, would actually be Episcopal, Anglican Protestant to the core.
The area’s Anglo settlers in the opening years of the 1800s established extensive agricultural properties, planting first indigo and then cotton and cane. As they prospered, they chafed under what they considered corrupt Spanish rule even after the Louisiana Purchase. In the fall of 1810 they threw out the Spanish and audaciously established an independent republic, which lasted a grand total of 74 days before the area was added to the United States.

By 1827 a number of the St. Francisville area’s most prominent residents, feeling the need for organized religious guidance, came together to draft a resolution to establish an Episcopal church, which would be the second one in the state. Some had been leaders of the West Florida Rebellion; even more were just a generation down from the Revolutionary War, their fathers having participated as Tories supporting the English or fighting for independence with George Washington on the American side, and a few were even Quakers. Now they would all come together as staunch Episcopalians.

“Whereas a number of citizens of the Parish of West Feliciana and State of Louisiana, being desirous to establish a church in connection with the Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States of America, and being desirous to call a clergyman of that denomination of Christians to officiate in said church, have associated themselves together for that purpose; and on the 15th day of March, 1827, at the town of St. Francisville, in said Parish, did organize themselves into an Association for that purpose.”

Named wardens at that meeting were Thomas Butler and William Flower; the vestry was made up of Dr. Ira Smith, Edward H. Barton, Henry Flower, Francis Dabney, Robert Young, Lewis Stirling, John Mulholland, Benjamin Muse House, Levi Blunt and John L. Lobdell. They were assessed $25 for the support of a minister, the name Grace was chosen for the new church, and a committee was appointed to collect subscriptions for buying a suitable property on which to erect a building.

By March 30th the Vestry called the Reverend William R. Bowman of Pennsylvania, age 27 and only recently ordained as a priest, as first rector of Grace Church. He’d come to the area to visit his sister Mary Bowman, who was married to Henry Stirling of Wakefield Plantation, brother of vestry member Lewis Stirling. Rev. Bowman was described in church records as a man of “commanding appearance, pleasing address, a correct reader, an eloquent preacher, and a fine theologian. All of his parishioners speak of him in the highest terms both as an agreeable gentleman and a christian minister.” By December 1828 he had married beautiful young Eliza Pirrie Barrow, pupil of John James Audubon at Oakley, widowed when her first husband supposedly perished of pneumonia contracted when he carried her across a flooded Homochitto River on the way to their elopement honeymoon in Natchez.

Four lots were purchased in April 1828 from Judge Thomas Chinn, first parish judge, for $200, for which he accepted a personal note from Dr. Ira Smith. A contract was entered into with Willis Thornton to “erect, build, and construct a church of brick in good substantial manner, with a solid foundation for such building, the church to be 20 feet in height to the square, walls 18 inches thick, 50 feet long and 38 feet wide, with Vestry room in the rear of brick, balcony in front 18 feet high, the front to be of brick, the remainder of wood…The organ gallery to be finished with plain facing and seats, and after same is completed, which shall be on or before the 25th day of December, 1828, the sum of $3,217 to be paid to said Thornton.”

This simple church of Georgian design was completed and was used by the congregation during the winter of 1828 in spite of not being plastered, painted or ceiled; only a bishop’s visitation in 1830 inspired the faithful to raise funds for its completion. In the early years of settlement, the faithful often moved from one church and denomination to another at will, and in January 1835 Rev. Bowman made this report to a convention in New Orleans: “Owing to the heterogeneous character of this congregation it is difficult to say what number of communicants are really attached to the Protestant Episcopal Church---they do not probably exceed eight or ten; there have been three Baptisms during the present year.”

Rev. Bowman succumbed to a “short but painful attack of congestive fever” in August of that same year. Grace Church would have several rectors over the next few years, with yellow fever rampant and hard times brought about by the depression and panic of 1837. One visiting clergyman was aghast to find “the doors wide open, the windows broken, the organ gone, the few prayer books torn in pieces, playing cards strewed about, and everything looking like sin and desolation.”
But Grace Church once again flourished under the Reverend Daniel Smith Lewis, originally from Massachusetts. Accepting the call to serve in the summer of 1839, within a year and a half he would report “Sunday Scholars 50; Teachers 8…the spiritual prospects of the Parish are encouraging. The attendance on Public Worship is constantly increasing and its happy influence marked and felt among this community. Our church has been greatly improved in the past year…” The church’s first parochial report to the annual convention reported “14 white and 31 colored infant baptisms, 7 white and 21 colored adult baptisms, 2 marriages, 14 funerals, and 14 Episcopal Communicants, 12 white and 2 colored, with 15 communicants belonging to other denominations.”

Its members were instrumental in forming a recognized Diocese in Louisiana and naming Leonidas Polk its bishop. Polk would serve for 23 years, until he resigned his duties to become the Fighting Bishop of the Confederacy. Beloved by his men, not so much by officers with more military experience, he was killed in the Battle of Pine Mountain in Georgia in 1864.

By 1845 there were 26 communicants. Rev. Lewis was not only responsible for several mission churches, St. Mary’s in the Weyanoke community and St. John’s at Laurel Hill, but also for several colored congregations of slaves on Troy and (Butler) Greenwood Plantations. He also was more or less in charge of St. Francisville schools, though they were not strictly parochial. For all this, Dr. Lewis received a salary of $1,200 a year.
In June of 1858 Bishop Leonidas Polk laid the cornerstone for a fine new church, Gothic in design with an off-center bell tower, “simple, chaste and dignified,” built directly in front of the site of the first structure but on greatly expanded grounds. Some of the added lots were acquired over the years from a family of Chews, called “free men of color.” The church was built of brick by Charles Nevitt Gibbons in a style reminiscent of English country churches remembered from his childhood. Gibbons had come to St. Francisville with his friend Robert Wickliffe, who would become the state’s sixteenth governor. An expert woodcarver, Gibbons produced all of Grace’s interior woodwork and also supervised the erection of the nearby Catholic Church. When he died an insolvent boarder in a Bayou Sara hotel in 1881, his estate, besides land sold for debts, listed “a lot of old books, a square, 2 old wrenches, a dozen assorted planes, a tri-square, 2 compasses, 1 chisel, a slate, and a small box of paints.”

In Grace Church exceptional early American leaded stained glass windows filter the sunlight across carved faux bois oak pews, while the top of the altar window and the rose window above the entrance door are European stained glass. In the south transept by the organ is a door with four red Bohemian glass panels, supposedly purchased at a later date with a gift from a “repentant Union Naval gunman” who helped shell the town during the Civil War.

Live oaks were planted in the church yard from the plantation of Mrs. Harriet Flower Mathews in 1855, making the cemetery a peaceful resting spot for generations of worshipers, and in that year it was partially enclosed by a wrought and cast-iron fence. Among the earliest of burials in the 1840s was that of baby Edward Baldwin, whose cause of death, no doubt a common one in those days of runaway horses and rutted roads and open carriages, was recorded as “flung from buggy.” Mrs. Mathews also gave the exceptional Pilcher pipe organ built into the south transcept in memory of her husband, Louisiana Supreme Court justice Judge George Mathews; shipped downriver from St. Louis in 1858, it is the oldest two-manual tracker-action organ still in use in the country. Playing this organ is not for the fainthearted nor the feeble, and at one point it had to be manually operated by hand bellows pumped by the sexton, who often fell asleep at the post, causing the organist to have to dismount from her bench to arouse him.

The church was completed by Easter Sunday of 1860. And then came the Civil War.
In the late summer of 1862, in retaliation for Confederate guerilla attacks, the Union gunboat Essex burned all houses and the markethouse along the levee in Bayou Sara, and St. Francisville suffered bombardments as well, with U.S. Naval records calling the town “a perfect hotbed of secession…the constant resort of Confederates.”

The following year, the bloody Siege of Port Hudson was pitting 30,000 Union troops against 6,800 weary Confederates fighting over the all-important control of traffic on the Mississippi River. Admiral David Farragut attempted to run the blockade at Port Hudson, but of his seven ships, only his flagship and the USS Albatross passed upriver safely, The Albatross was patrolling the Mississippi River off Bayou Sara just below St. Francisville when a shot rang out from the captain’s stateroom. It was 4:15 p.m. on June 11, and the vessel’s commander, John Elliot Hart of Schenectady, New York, had shot himself.

Commander Hart was a Mason. Living near the river were several helpful brothers named White who were also Masons; and in St. Francisville was Feliciana Lodge No. 31 F&AM, the second oldest Masonic Lodge in the state. Its senior warden, William Walter Leake, a captain in the First Louisiana Cavalry, was at home on furlough. It would be his duty, he felt, to afford a decent burial to a fellow Mason and fellow military officer, regardless of politics. And so the war stopped, if only for a few mournful moments, and Commander Hart was laid to rest in the cemetery around Grace Episcopal Church, with Union and Confederate Masons participating in the burial services along with the Episcopal rector, the Reverend Daniel Lewis.

An article in the New Orleans Times-Picayune in 1937 called this event “one of the strangest born of the War Between the States, when fighting men could battle to the death and yet know chivalry, when war had not become the cold-blooded butchery of today.” The article also referred to Hart’s grave in Grace Church cemetery’s Masonic plot as “a Yankee grave that Dixie decorates,” for every year on Memorial Day and All Saint’s Day, fresh flowers were placed, initially by Confederate Mason William Walter Leake whose intervention facilitated the burial. This unlikely event is observed each year in St. Francisville (this year June 15, from 9 to 5, all free), with re-enactors in blue and grey joining Masons recreating the burial, plus vintage presentations, Masonic programs and evening socials to celebrate not a battle but the bonds of brotherhood that proved stronger even than the divisiveness of a bitter civil conflict.

Then in January 1864 St. Francisville was shelled for hours by the USS Lafayette. Lieutenant Commander James P. Foster reported “one hundred and eight shots were fired slowly and with great accuracy, each one telling.” The bell tower of Grace Church was a tempting target. Church records note that “one shell entering at the front corner and dislodging large masses of brick, spent its force in the chancel and lay there unexploded, and another passed through the organ.” The rector of Grace was said to have sent a servant down to the river under a flag of truce to inform the gunners that “to fire upon God’s House is unthinkable.”

One story relates how old Aunt Silvia Chew, free woman of color whose family had originally owned much of the land purchased by Grace Church, sought protection inside the church until a cannon ball whistled over her head and crashed through the window. She fled in terror and hid behind the substantial tomb of Dr. Ira Smith, founding vestry member, whose unusual pyramidal tomb of Egyptian Revival design was originally intended for multiple burials (but not anymore; one of his descendants supposedly threw the key into the Mississippi River). At least Aunt Silvia Chew lived to tell the tale.

The church was a shattered wreck, its surviving congregation suffering and scattered. Of 72 white and 27 colored communicants on the rolls in 1861, only 32 white and 2 colored remained in 1866. But these hardy souls gathered in the damaged church for Easter services that year. Times had changed. Where there had been 493 white registered voters in the parish in 1860, now there would be 173 white and 1,630 newly registered black voters.

There was little money available for repairs to the church, and Rev. Daniel S. Lewis, after serving God in Grace Church for 27 years, left for New Orleans. The year 1872 saw a new minister arrive, Rev. Alexander Gordon Bakewell, who worked for 12 years leading and rebuilding, adding a rectory, completing the beautiful wrought iron fence around the churchyard. By the late 1850s, the cemetery’s tombstones and grave markers, originally simple memorial stones, began to be highly ornate Victorian Gothic styles, carved pillars covered with stone ivy or Grecian drapes, statuary and elaborate floral carvings and flowing epitaphs. Improving finances among congregation members brought many donations, but it was the generous 1883 gift of $12,000 from Mrs. Sarah P. Lawrason that allowed restoration of the church building.

In 1886 the Reverend William Kirkland Douglas came to Grace; one church history says, “Originally from Connecticut, he was yet understanding and kind. His gentle piety became known to all, and he grew to be a Southerner in life and purpose.” His tenure was marked by improvements including the establishment of a Woman’s Auxiliary, which supported missions and presented the rector with a new horse, saddle and buggy. By 1893 the church was reconsecrated and free of debt. A rectory built in 1895 was called by one occupant “Vicious Victorian architecture” for its freezing rooms, steep stairs and lack of proper plumbing. Next to the rectory was the church’s parish hall, Jackson Hall, dating from 1896; its upstairs was originally used as a lodge room of the fraternal and benevolent society known as the Knights of Pythias, and the lower floor a community opera house that held everything from weddings and wakes to dances, graduations and boxing matches.

Others were called to Grace over the years, with some staying a number of years and leaving indelible marks upon church and congregation, most notably Rev. J. Arthur Klein who came in 1950, Rev. John Senette, Father Kenneth Dimmick, and the current rector, Father Roman Roldan, born in Columbia, whose background as a social worker has surely encouraged the church’s valiant response in times of disasters like hurricanes and floods. Each has contributed in unique ways to assure that Grace Church retains its ministry not only to its congregants but to its many visitors. Said Father Kenneth Dimmick, “The reaching limbs of our ancient oaks provide for even the most casual visitor a place of silence and restfulness, where many find they can hear the voice of God. To kneel and pray in our historic church offers the chance to meditate on the changelessness of God’s love.”

For several decades Grace has provided a wonderful community-wide preschool begun onsite in 1982, plus nursing home ministry, youth activities, choirs and community outreach not just locally but around the globe, thanks to nuclear power and energy exploration propelling this little country church into a position of world responsibility and Christian stewardship.

When River Bend Nuclear Plant was constructed in the 1970s south of St. Francisville, the property left to the church by widowed longtime parishioner Ada Z. Mackie was purchased by Entergy for a considerable sum and the proceeds were used to acquire a historic structure on Royal St. When in 1980, as oil and gas activity in the parish accelerated because of nearby finds in the Tuscaloosa Trend, Amoco Oil leased and then purchased half the royalty rights of the extensive Lavergne property, given to the church in 1929 by an old bachelor who had served in the Confederacy, whose family was all buried in Grace churchyard, and whose will consisted of one lone statement: “I will all I die possessed of to the Grace Episcopal Church, West Feliciana.”

Then–rector Rev. John Senette thoughtfully considered this new bounty for a church that had faced financial struggles in different periods of its history, “I wanted us to be responsible in using the money wisely, not only for ourselves but for worthwhile purposes outside the community,” he said as he guided the long process of meetings, arguments, compromise. “There developed a growing awareness that the bounty so generously given us was being seen as not ours alone. There was a feeling of receiving it in trust, not only for the benefit of our spiritual family and descendants, but for a broken and suffering humanity. The generosity of Grace Church since 1980 has been felt in this area, the nation and the world.” Thus the feeling that it was the responsibility of the current parishioners to support the church; said Libby Dart, parish historian and longtime Grace worker, “It is the obligation and the privilege of the living to support the church.” Added Father Senette: “These stewards seem determined not to allow the generous dead to usurp the joyful privilege of the living.” So the Lavergne Charitable Fund was established by the vestry and authorized to use not less than 10% of the trust funds “as a vehicle through which Grace Church can exert a Christian influence and extend a helping hand in and outside the community.”

Other than times when weddings or funerals are scheduled, Grace Church welcomes visitors and is certainly one of the little rivertown’s most visited historic attractions.

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 is open in season and is spectacular. Particularly important to tourism in the area are its two significant state historic sites, Rosedown Plantation (a National Historic Landmark) 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.

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. 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 www.stfrancisvillefestivals.com, www.stfrancisville.net or www.stfrancisville.us (the events calendar gives dates and information on special activities).

Wedding Bells Ring in St. Francisville, La.

noreply@blogger.com (Blue Goose Media) — Fri, 26 Apr 2019 12:45:00 +0000

Wedding Bells Ring in St. Francisville, LA
By Anne Butler

Dreaming of a destination wedding? There’s no need to travel too far away; St. Francisville offers all the conveniences of home, but guarantees you’ll feel a million miles away.
Back in the day, weddings were mostly formal affairs, held in churches with elaborate floral arrangements and guests dressed fit to kill, the bride wearing white and her attendants in outfits that would never come out of the closet again. That was then.

This is now: Many ceremonies these days are second (or maybe even third) weddings, the couples having been there and done that formally the first time. It’s not their first rodeo, and they want something casual, more relaxed, hopefully even enjoyable this time around.

Destination weddings at the beach or on a mountaintop in Colorado, the bride barefoot in the sand in a billowing maxi dress or wearing hiking boots clutching a bouquet of wildflowers, have become the “in” thing, and St. Francisville has become one of the state’s most popular wedding destinations.
The area can provide the perfect place to fulfill any bride’s heart’s desires, be it her first wedding or (heaven forbid) her fourth, from glorious garden settings to charming chapels, from lakeside amphitheaters to oak-shaded plantation properties and pastoral pastures. And yes, there are beautiful historic churches as well. Not only does St. Francisville offer the ideal site; there are also professional services available locally…caterers, officiants, florists, wedding coordinators, photographers, musicians, rental tents and tables, romantic overnight accommodations for honeymooners and wedding guests as well.
Several of the historic plantations host only small weddings. Rosedown Plantation State Historic Site offers beautiful backdrops in the 28-acre formal gardens or oak allee for 15 or 20 guests, only before dark, with hourly rates and requirements for the private purchase of liability insurance; nothing is permitted inside the 1830s home (phone 225-635-3332). Butler Greenwood, an even earlier plantation, does not have parking or restroom facilities to accommodate large groups, but does offer beautiful moss-draped oak trees and a lane of 19th-century cast-iron urns leading to a vine-covered pergola complete with hitching post (a favorite spot of the local Justice of the Peace). Only wedding parties of 15 or fewer are permitted and only on the grounds, but very reasonably priced and with romantic private cottages for honeymooners (phone 225-635-6312). Other plantations like The Cottage and The Myrtles provide honeymoon accommodations but do not currently host weddings, though the new restaurant at The Myrtles has all sorts of possibilities for rehearsal dinners and receptions.

Afton Villa Gardens offers glorious 19th-century garden settings in spite of the elaborate plantation house having burned in the 1960s, with lengthy oak alley, terraced grounds, formal parterres, marble statuary and a ruins garden room filled with blooms in season (phone 225-635-6773; for bridal photos 225-721-2269; for weddings 703-508-5073).

Greenwood Plantation also provides a spectacular site for weddings of all sizes, with all-inclusive wedding packages that can include the first floor of the 1830s mansion, the grounds with majestic live oaks and reflecting pond, bricked patio and outside kitchen building, even a small chapel that seats 50 and was constructed as the overseer’s house during the filming of a movie. Also available are dressing rooms for bride and groom, overnight B&B stay, setup and cleanup, plus bridal portraits, rehearsal dinners, caterers and vendors for receptions, bridal luncheons and showers…this is the full scope of wedding services, priced accordingly, and wedding coordinators work with bridal couples to ensure complete satisfaction (phone 225-655-4475).

Another popular setting that can accommodate large weddings both indoors and out is Hemingbough, and its new Marketing and Events Director can work with couples to customize the perfect package plan. Breathtakingly beautiful ceremonies are held in the Greek amphitheater that seats hundreds overlooking Audubon Lake (setting for an annual Easter sunrise service), while indoor spaces include a memorial chapel with beautiful stained glass windows and pipe organ. On-site catering is available, as are overnight accommodations in the 8-room Guest House replica of Uncle Sam Plantation’s garconnier. For receptions, the ballroom at Hemstead Hall holds large groups, while the stately Audubon Room is ideal for smaller parties (phone 225-635-6617 or 225-978-7557).

Noted for its elegant simplicity is the small chapel available for weddings at The Bluffs on Thompson Creek, resort complete with spectacular Arnold Palmer-designed golf course, overnight accommodations in one- and two-bedroom suites in The Lodge and several restaurant options (phone 225-634-6400 or 634-5222).

In St. Francisville’s National Register-listed historic district is Temple Sinai, turn-of-the-century Jewish temple overlooking the Mississippi River, recently restored by the non-profit Freyhan Foundation as a non-denominational event center and indoor site for weddings. It can accommodate up to 100 guests, with restroom facilities and small kitchenette, plus perfect acoustics, stained glass windows and rows of comfortable pews. Reasonably priced with damage deposit required; reservations may be made through the West Feliciana Historical Society’s director at 225-635-6330, who can also furnish information on reserving 1819 Audubon Market Hall, another historic indoor venue downtown with a capacity of 40-50 guests.

Just down Royal Street, Shadetree Inn hosts small outdoor weddings on its picturesque hilltop setting and provides three eclectic suites for honeymoon overnights (phone 225-635-6116).
Also in the historic district next to Parker Memorial Park is the St. Francisville Inn, which recently underwent an ambitious renovation and now offers craft cocktails in The Saint bar, a catering kitchen (elegant breakfast/brunch daily, plus group lunches and dinners by reservation), and small weddings of fewer than 25 guests on the front lawn or in the bricked courtyard; for larger groups, rental of all 11 guest rooms is required. If the new owners of this boutique property can pull off an outside tented sit-down dinner for 180 guests in the midst of wild winds and tornado warnings mere days after opening as handily as they did, our hats are off to them! Phone 225-635-6502.

Local caterers include popular Heirloom Cuisine for elegant refreshments (225-784-0535) and Tip’s Catering Connection (from Black Tie to Backyard Barbeque plus rental tables, chairs, tents, fans and heaters) (225-921-7785). Temple Design offers creative custom services for wedding invitations and other print materials (225-635-9454), while Tara Marie Photography takes excellent photos (225-634-7229) as does Lilly Belle Photo (225-721-3636); Stacey Foretich Photography does not shoot weddings but does amazing engagement photos (225-505-7906). Mia Sophia Florist, whose head designer/owner has three decades of experience, provides fresh flowers from growers across the United States, custom bouquets, tablescapes, rental plants, arches and backdrops (phone 225-635-3339). To contact retired Justice of the Peace Kevin Dreher regarding officiating, phone 225-721-1120. Information on all of these services may be found online at www.stfrancisville.us.

On May 5 from 7 to 10 p.m., Temple Sinai is the setting for an Arts For All concert featuring acclaimed guitarist Arnold Cardon, plus Nancy Roppolo with harmonica virtuoso husband Joe and Susan Aysen.

Besides weddings and concerts, fans of fine literature flock to St. Francisville in May for two popular festivals, the West Feliciana Children’s Book Festival in Parker Park on May 4th, and the Walker Percy Weekend May 31 through June 2nd. “Reading Gives You Wings” is the theme of the third annual children’s literary festival, featuring storytelling tent, crafts, sidewalk chalk art contests, and authors of children’s, middle and young adult books performing, reading and discussing their works. It’s fun, and it’s free, and it goes on from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m.

Friday, May 31, the Walker Percy Weekend kicks off with a reception and cocktails under the majestic oaks. This will be followed on Saturday, June 1, by lectures and panel discussions as experts expound on themes in Percy’s fiction, much of it set in south Louisiana as the author explored “the search for meaning in an increasingly materialistic society via masterfully wrought tales delivered with a poetic Southern sensibility and informed by the author’s deep Catholic faith.” Saturday afternoon highlight is the Progressive Front Porch Tour and Bourbon Tasting, and the evening culminates with the popular crawfish boil and craft beer celebration. Among the acclaimed speakers are New York Times columnist/author David Brooks, Hillbilly Elegy author J.D. Vance, and Walter Isaacson, noted for his astute biographies of Leonardo da Vinci, Steve Jobs, Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein. This popular event benefits the sponsoring non-profit Julius Freyhan Foundation. For additional information and tickets, see www.walkerpercyweekend.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 splendidly restored plantation homes are open for tours: The Cottage Plantation (weekends), Myrtles Plantation, Greenwood Plantation, plus Catalpa Plantation by reservation; Afton Villa Gardens is open in season and is spectacular. Particularly important to tourism in the area are its two significant state historic sites, Rosedown Plantation (a National Historic Landmark) 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.

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. 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 www.stfrancisvillefestivals.com, www.stfrancisville.net or www.stfrancisville.us (the events calendar gives dates and information on special activities).

Carl the Roving Ram Cuts Up in St. Francisville, LA

noreply@blogger.com (Blue Goose Media) — Mon, 08 Apr 2019 14:30:00 +0000

Carl the Roving Ram Cuts Up in St. Francisville, LA
By Anne Butler

Sometimes in the country you’ve got to make your own fun, and little St. Francisville, full as it is of creative souls, sure knows how to do that.

Take Carl. Poor Carl. He was a regal Dall Sheep, inhabitant of the alpine ridges and steep slopes of the frozen Yukon Territory and Alaska, cavorting among the rocky crags in death-defying feats of agility. Carl had thick curling horns and must have presented a tempting target for the trophy hunter who apparently took him down and then took him to a taxidermist to be stuffed. A fine trophy, indeed.

So how did Carl end up climbing mountains of junk instead of Northwest Territory mountainsides? Even Bubba, the proprietor of the popular flea market on Commerce St. in St. Francisville, can’t remember where Carl came from or who brought him in, although you’d think he’d have made an impression (not every day do you get a stuffed goat). But Bubba has such a passion for used treasures that his wares overflow his crowded house and spill out into the yard; he can’t possibly remember everything.

So Carl happened to be out there sunning in full view of passersby, and that’s when he entered the twilight zone known as the Court of Three Sisters. Sister One sped by one morning and spotted Carl. Sister One immediately saw possibilities and called Sister Two, who enthusiastically hired the local plant nursery’s van to pick up Carl, who was too big to fit in her car. Sister Two remembers paying Bubba $15 to relieve him of something he never thought he’d sell. And poor Sister Three, the more serious and particular one of the family, soon freaked out to find Carl in her front yard on Ferdinand Street for all the world to see, decked out in a big red velvet bow and magically transformed into Carl the Christmas Ram.

That third sister, the practical one, not wanting Carl to greet guests at her own house forever, hung a list of instructions around Carl’s neck regarding length of stay (just a night), location (in town, or close by), and the requirement to post images, and then she quickly deposited him in someone else’s front yard. And thus Carl acquired a life of his own, honored guest at Christmas parties and family reunions and all manner of gatherings.

Sometimes he was decorated with shining Christmas lights, sometimes with a glowing red nose like Rudolph. There were Mardi Gras beads and mistletoe. At one home he wore red plaid flannel pajamas, and when it rained he often had an umbrella to protect him from the downpour, although he seemed to have less of his own hair after every soaking. And that wet-dog smell every pet owner knows and loves…imagine wet mountain goat!

One image shows Carl stretched out on the local veterinarian’s examining table, the vet sorrowfully declaring there was no help for Carl. A modest hostess even suggested knitting a pouch to hold Carl’s family jewels, the ram being what vets call “intact” and hardly a Hallmark moment.

Everybody in St. Francisville delighted in being able to boast, “We’ve been rammed!” And it was fun. Carl the Christmas Ram confined his perambulations to the period around the Christmas holidays; now he awaits his next appearance in that third sister’s storage unit.

There had been precedents, of course, and not so seasonally dependent. Magnolia Café, everybody’s favorite little local casual place, has for years had a lifesize painted pig, named Gustav for the hurricane, greeting folks dropping by for pita-bread sandwiches and homemade soups and sensation salads. Periodically Gustav the pig would wander. This was not on its own, of course, being made of aluminum; there were nefarious kidnappers who carted him off to different locations, not only private homes but even the Louisiana Marathon. He has also been known to ride atop a float in St. Francisville’s popular Christmas parade.

And then there was grey-haired Granny Francis, resurrected from a garbage pile a few years back. Some three feet tall and plump with a winsome grandmotherly grin, Granny Francis was a real social butterfly. She visited around to all the local stores and tourist attractions, properly attired and escorted by town employees or Main Street staff, played the drums with the local dance band, participated in popular events like the Audubon Pilgrimage and Polos & Pearls (yes, she wore pearls and was pictured beforehand in spa robe getting a beauty treatment with debatable success), went Trick-or-Treating in her witch costume, and attended the local elementary school where she was confined mostly to the principal’s office. Granny Francis was a favorite both in person and on Facebook during her active social life, but now she seems to have retired to a spot in the town mayor’s office where she can try to keep him in line.

Obviously St. Francisville, which is a Main Street community as well as a National Register Historic District, has a well-established sense of place, preserving significant elements of its 19th-century history and architecture along its two main streets that run down to the Mississippi River; they call it the little town that’s two miles long and two yards wide, without much exaggeration. It is full of restored tour homes and gardens, great restaurants and shops, beautiful historic churches, great B&Bs, and unsurpassed recreation in the surrounding Tunica Hills. Tourists love to visit. But St. Francisville residents love living there as well, for the little town also has an appreciation for creative characters and a well-honed sense of fun.

April of course brings the ever-popular annual Angola Prison Spring Rodeo on April 27 and 28, pitting determined inmates against ferocious Brahman bulls and bucking broncos; grounds open at 9 a.m. for the Craft Show and rodeo starts at 2. For tickets and information, telephone 225-655-2060 or www.angolaprisonrodeo.com. Also on April 27 the LSU Ag Center sponsors its fascinating Spring Stroll Garden Tour (for information, contact jhoover@agcenter.lsu.edu).

Earlier in the month, on April 13, Audubon State Historic Site presents a fun and educational return to the Regency Period, with dance and etiquette lessons, a duel and an explanation of the intricate language of fans, plus a glimpse into the life of a soldier in the War of 1812 (225-635-3739 or 888-677-2838).

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 is open in season and is spectacular. Particularly important to tourism in the area are its two significant state historic sites, Rosedown Plantation (a National Historic Landmark) 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.

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. 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 www.stfrancisvillefestivals.com, www.stfrancisville.net or www.stfrancisville.us (the events calendar gives dates and information on special activities).

Colorful Azaleas and Costumes of the 1820s Welcome Spring in St. Francisville, LA

noreply@blogger.com (Blue Goose Media) — Fri, 22 Feb 2019 04:43:00 +0000

Colorful Azaleas and Costumes of the 1820s Welcome Spring in St. Francisville, LA
By Anne Butler

The forty-eighth annual Audubon Pilgrimage March 15, 16 and 17, 2019, celebrates a southern spring in St. Francisville, the glorious garden spot of Louisiana’s English Plantation Country. For nearly half a century 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 studies and tutored the daughter of Oakley Plantation’s Pirrie family, beautiful young Eliza. A year’s worth of planning and preparation precedes each pilgrimage, and with nearly half a century of experience under their belt, society members put on one of the South’s most professional and enjoyable pilgrimage presentations.

Featured this year are three historic plantation homes in the countryside and two townhouses, plus lots of extras.

Sunnyside, built in 1838 in Pointe Coupee Parish, was disassembled, trucked across the Mississippi River bridge in 1997, then meticulously reassembled on the Tunica Trace, retaining its original footprint. A fine example of vernacular architecture, its bluffland design is eminently suite to the historic Weyanoke community and its period landscaping anchors house to site as if it’s been there for centuries. Historian David Floyd and wife Marla have raised two children there.

Laurel Hill Plantation was purchased in the 1830s by Judge Edward McGehee, founder of the early standard-gauge West Feliciana Railroad that hauled cotton through this plantation country to the Mississippi River port at Bayou Sara. In the 1870s daughter Caroline and her husband Duncan Stewart enlarged the original small Carolina-I structure to accommodate their growing family. Beautifully restored, it is now the property of Jimmy and Mary Farrar Hatchette.

Puente Largo, built in the 1850s in Tangipahoa Parish and moved to West Feliciana in 1997, is a handsome raised Creole cottage with four large rooms and spacious hallway on the upper premier etage, above what had been an unfinished ground-floor storage for wagons and buggies but is now closed in. Broad front stairs access the upper gallery. Used as a field hospital during the Civil War, Puente Largo has been beautifully furnished and landscaped by owners Mike and Krista Dumas.

In St. Francisville’s downtown National Register-listed Historic District is the Brasseaux House, quintessentially charming cottage complete with Victorian gallery trim, picket fence and climbing roses. It was built in 1895 by Albert Sydney Brasseaux, who was named for his father’s commanding general in the Civil War. Its architectural style is called southern dogtrot, and its extensive sloping back yard shows why St. Francisville is called the little town that’s two miles long and two yards wide. It is now home to a vibrant young family, the Magruder Hazlips.

And then there’s the Coffin House, tiny stepped-roof structure built around 1903 right on St. Francisville’s main thoroughfare, proving history is nothing if not dynamic and showing the amazing adaptability of even the most unassuming of historic structures. Previously used for strictly utilitarian purposes including the storage of coffins, it is now a delightfully cozy pied-a-terre for visiting doting grandparents, Don and Harriet Ayres.
In addition to the featured homes, pilgrimage visitors are also welcomed to Afton Villa Gardens, Audubon (Oakley) and Rosedown State Historic Sites, three 19th-century churches and Temple Sinai in town and beautiful St. John’s and St. Mary’s in the country, plus the Rural Homestead with lively demonstrations of the rustic skills of daily pioneer life.

Audubon Market Hall hosts an exhibit of the West Feliciana works of the late Charles Reinike (1906-1983), one of New Orleans’ most respected landscape artists. Passionately in love with South Louisiana from New Orleans through the wetlands and the hills of rural plantation country, Reinike and wife Vera opened an art school in the French Quarter in the 1930s-1940s and brought their students to summer art camp on their West Feliciana property where their daughter lives today. Reinike’s paintings are nostalgic but not saccharine, his son Charles III explains; “he liked the grittier side of things...depicting rural Louisiana and chronicling the early African-American cabins and lifestyle for their honesty and simplicity, as well as the residential and industrial scenes of New Orleans and the Mississippi River, and the beauty of the bayous and shrimp boats.”
An impressive exhibit of Audubon’s Birds of Feliciana hangs at Oakley Plantation (Audubon State Historic Site). Other special events called Exploring Nature and Birding remind of continued ties to the birdlife so beloved by the artist: Friday bird walk is led by local artist Murrell Butler at his Oak Hill property; Saturday the Wildlife Hospital of Louisiana offers a glimpse of live-and-in-person rehab survivors (Red-Winged Scarlett, Red-Tailed Hawk, Mississippi Kite, Broad Winged Hawk, Eastern Screech Owl); Sunday’s bird walk is led by LSU avian vet Dr. Tom Tully at Oakley.
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, Graveyard Tours at Grace Episcopal cemetery (last tour begins at 8:15 p.m.), and a wine and cheese reception at the newly restored St. Francisville Inn showing off the exquisitely detailed 1820’s evening costumes, nationally recognized for their authenticity. Light Up The Night, the fun Saturday evening soiree, features live music and dancing, dinner and drinks.

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, all evening entertainment Friday and Saturday, and a Saturday picnic lunch. Tickets can be purchased at the Historical Society Museum on Ferdinand Street. For information on St. Francisville overnight accommodations, shops, restaurants, and recreation in the Tunica Hills, see www.stfrancisville.us, www.stfrancisville.net, or www.stfrancisvillefestivals.com.

Beautiful oak-shaded Parker Park in the midst of St. Francisville’s National Register-listed Historic District is the scene for two other special activities in March. A Walk In The Park on Saturday, March 2nd, from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. will feature live music plus vendors offering varied crafts, art and culinary specialties, while March 30th from 10 to 10 the Tunica Hills Music Festival and Jam has professional musicians performing on stages but also dispersed throughout the park to encourage pop-up jams everywhere. Visitors are encouraged to bring their own instruments and join in the free fun.

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 is open in season and is spectacular. Particularly important to tourism in the area are its two significant state historic sites, Rosedown Plantation (a National Historic Landmark) 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.

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. 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 www.stfrancisvillefestivals.com, www.stfrancisville.net or www.stfrancisville.us (the events calendar gives dates and information on special activities).

Post-Bellum Sanctuary and Salvation: the Old Benevolent Society in St. Francisville By Anne Butler

noreply@blogger.com (Blue Goose Media) — Wed, 23 Jan 2019 14:56:00 +0000

Post-Bellum Sanctuary and Salvation: the Old Benevolent Society in St. Francisville
By Anne Butler

February is Black History Month, so it’s only right that a little neglected structure in the middle of St. Francisville should be getting increased attention.

The St. Francisville area has been fortunate to retain a number of restored plantation homes that welcome visitors with an impressive picture of life as it was for the upper echelon of antebellum society in the South. But other structures---smaller, simpler---speak in quieter tones to teach a history lesson no less significant.

One such structure is the tiny Old Benevolent Society. Its small green historic marker designates this unassuming wood-frame shotgun house as the oldest black burial lodge in the parish. It was founded in 1883 by a gentleman of color whose grandson would more than a century later become president of the parish police jury.

The sign gives just the merest hint of the importance of benevolent societies in the turbulent aftermath of the Civil War, when slaves feed from bondage found few resources to fill needs hitherto addressed by masters of the plantations where they labored.

The most important institution for freedmen in those days was the church, which struggled to provide not just spiritual but temporal comfort as well in the absence of social service organizations or insurance companies open to persons of color. The church offered sanctuary and socialization in addition to salvation.

From tiny black churches sprang the soulful gospel music spiced by the cadences of African chants, the church suppers, shouting with the spirit, and all the other traditional rituals treasured by black congregants, practices that served to set them apart from the staid Protestant worship of their former owners.

And nearly every church had its benevolent society, officially incorporated under the direction of respected elders of the congregation. Preserved documents reveal that, while some of these church leaders laboriously wrote their names on deeds in the fanciful flowing script of the times, others, unlearned, simply signed with an X.
But they all took their responsibilities seriously, for the benevolent societies they formed filled direct and pressing needs. With few other outside resources, these societies offered significant services to their members---sitting with the sick, caring for the infirm, feeding the weak, funding medical care, and finally covering the modest expenses of a decent burial as well.

By July 1911 when the Union Reform Society applied for a charter, the corporation’s purposes had been embellished beyond these basics to include: “To better the condition of its members by shaping their manners, and framing their characters by the promotion of honesty, good morals and the diffusion of knowledge among them; and to care for the sick members of the organization; to aid them in distress, to bury their dead, and generally to promote and foster Friendship, Love and Good Fellowship.”

An 1877 issue of the West Feliciana Sentinel described the annual meeting of the Union Benevolent Society as involving a 75-foot table groaning under the weight of “turkey, chicken, sugar-cured hams, deliciously barbecued beef, mutton and pig, flanked with vegetables, fruits, desserts and wines. It was the finest ‘spread’ we have seen in many a long day, and reflected great credit upon our friends of the ‘Benevolents.’ We have frequently had occasion to mark the perfect order and decorum of the society when paying the last sad tribute to the dead, and the spontaneous manner in which they turn out upon such occasions.”

Only a few churches maintain their societies in this day of equal access to medical and life insurance coverage, and the Old Benevolent Society building has seen better days. No longer housed there is the horse-drawn black hearse that transported the deceased to burial grounds, mourners walking behind, women in white, carrying candles. But the structure deserves to be preserved as a reminder of the significant role benevolent societies played in southern black society of the late 19th and early 29th centuries.
Now an Old Benevolent Society Restoration Committee has formed, made up of representatives of the local historical society, town of St. Francisville, parish school system, members of the local Order of the Eastern Star, and other avid preservationists. Already overhanging tree branches have been removed and some short-term stabilization work undertaken to minimize further deterioration, though the structure in its present condition remains unsafe for use.

The Louisiana Trust for Historic Preservation included the site as one of fifteen on its 2018 list of Most Endangered, bringing much needed attention statewide with hopes of generating funding assistance. Said Brian Davis, executive director of the Louisiana Trust, “Historic buildings and sites are the fingerprints of our communities and it takes creative measures to preserve and protect them for future generations. Strategic partnerships, tax credits, and programs like revolving funds can save buildings many people may consider too far gone.”

Plans include applying for an individual listing on the National Register of Historic Places; the structure is already included in the Register’s St. Francisville Historic District. Social media and grant opportunities are being identified, and the committee hopes to enlist a preservation consultant to assess the building’s condition in anticipation of establishing a restoration scope and budget.
Once restored, the committee envisions a small museum telling the story of benevolent societies and their significant role in African American history. In addition, it may be open to the public for special local events and festivals, educational children’s programs, and other activities. For information on restoration efforts, email obsrestoration@gmail.com.
February is also the month for the much-anticipated Writers and Readers Symposium, sponsored annually by The Celebration of Literature and Art at Hemingbough conference center just south of St. Francisville on Highway 965. Every year the selection committee brings in accomplished published writers of every genre to present their works and creative processes, and avid readers have a chance to visit with these authors, purchase autographed books and enjoy lunch. This year’s presentation, on Saturday, February 16, from 9 to 3:30, features an amazing lineup of six award-winning writers.

Jason Berry, New Orleans author and film director, is best known for his pioneering investigative reporting on clergy sex abuse in the Catholic Church, but his most recent book, City of a Million Dreams, covers the 300-year history of New Orleans. His other books, Up From the Cradle of Jazz, Render Unto Rome, Vows of Silence, and Lead Us Not into Temptation, have been called the perfect balance of scholarship, compassion, and the ability to write with the poetic power of Robert Penn Warren. Dr. Jack Bedell, Louisiana’s 2017-2019 Poet Laureate, is a professor of English at Southeastern Louisiana University and longtime editor of the college literary magazine; he is the author of nine books.
Erica Spindler, another featured presenter, is a prolific New York Times best-selling author whose books have been published in 25 countries and are called thrill-packed page-turners, white-knuckle rides and edge-of-your-seat whodunits. Among her most popular books are The Other Girl, The First Wife, All Fall Down, and Bone Cold. C.H. Lawler’s books, including The Saints of Lost Things and Living Among the Dead, tell moving stories of flawed characters from a place of compassion...a 1965 hurricane awakening a forbidden love, or an old man in 1925 on Prytania St. in New Orleans recording his memories of the aftermath of the Civil War.

Dima Ghawi is a motivational speaker and author of Breaking Vases, her memoir of a Middle Eastern woman’s struggles to escape the subservient culture to pursue her passion of helping others find the courage to overcome hardships and forge their own paths. A special addition to this symposium will be a presentation by Alysson Foti Bourque, the author of several award-winning children’s books: the Rhyme or Reason Travel series and the Alycat series, emphasizing techniques for book promotion.

Tickets for the 2019 Writers and Readers Symposium, $45 including lunch, are available from bontempstix.com/even...writers-readers-symposium.
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 is open in season and is spectacular. Particularly important to tourism in the area are its two significant state historic sites, Rosedown Plantation (a National Historic Landmark) 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.

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. 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 www.stfrancisvillefestivals.com, www.stfrancisville.net or www.stfrancisville.us (the events calendar gives dates and information on special activities).

Old-Time Medications...weird but they worked!

noreply@blogger.com (Blue Goose Media) — Sun, 13 Jan 2019 02:55:00 +0000

Old-Time Medications...weird but they worked!
By Anne Butler

There’s a wonderful new full-service hospital and a number of physicians practicing medicine in St. Francisville now, but back in the days when money was scarce and doctors were even scarcer in rural areas, folks doctored themselves with a wide assortment of home remedies.
Of course every early plantation had its kitchen garden, where herbs and culinary additives were supplemented by treasured medicinal plants, with every housewife worth her salt knowing the value of each. But well into the 20th century, isolated country folk continued to rely on time-honored traditions of home remedies passed down through the generations. And current doctors admit there was something to be said for at least some of these folk cures.

The late Reverend H.S. Pate, pastor to a rural flock, always insisted, “Those old sayings and remedies held true in the old days, and they hold true today. Used to be, you had to ride horseback through the woods to get to a doctor, if you could get to one at all, so folks did their own doctoring.” And it wasn’t simply a matter of money; they really believed that the folk cures worked.

JC Metz and Amy having a tea party

Now in his 90s, J.C. Metz, one of many sons of a pioneering logging family which during the Depression got their sustenance as well as their remedies from the swampy areas bordering the Mississippi River, remembers many cures his mother utilized. Pepper tea, made of hot water and black pepper, would sweat the fever out of anybody, coughs were cured with a syrup made by boiling wild plum bark with sugar and lemon, while whiskey and honey remedied the worst sore throats. Sinus problems were cleared up with a mixture of honey, whiskey and apple cider, and an application of catfish fat rendered into oil was used to treat the common cold. For cuts, turpentine and iodine reduced the danger of infection, and bleeding was stopped by applying spider webs to the affected area. Tobacco juice took the sting out of insect bites, and for thorns or boils, a poultice of okra blossoms or salt meat would draw out the offending article. Warm honey in the ear was used to soften wax and cure ear aches. And each spring, the blood was purified with a tonic of sassafras root or vine boiled into a tea.

Other elderly folks swore by other practices, especially teas made of various ingredients. The white leaves of the sassafras bush cured fevers and colds, while tea made from ordinary cornshucks was said to cure measles. Tea made from life-everlasting weed or bitterweed helped reduce fever, and another cure for colds was tea made from scrapings from hogs’ hooves, also said to be effective for pneumonia.

Sardine oil rubbed on the jaws, which should then be bound with a scarf, would reduce the pain from mumps. Aching limbs could be soothed by application of hot Epsom salts and turpentine or boiled cedar, which could also unstop the most stuffed-up nose. Palm of Christian leaves, applied directly to the affected area straight off the bush, drew out headache pain, while tea made from the leaves of the Jerusalem bush cured worms. Lighter fluid was another recommended rub for arthritis pain, as were poultices of boiled mullin leaves to reduce swelling and pain, and could cure dropsy as well. For rheumatism, a bottle of table salt mixed with red pepper could be rubbed onto the limbs, while coal oil and turpentine was applied under the throat and on the chest to cure colds.

Bit by a snake? Old folks would kill a chicken and extract the gall bladder, then apply it to the bitten area. No chickens available? They could draw out the snake poison with coal oil or kerosene and soda.

For small infants and children, there was a whole list of do’s and don’t’s to be observed. To stop hiccups, cross two broomstraws in the crown of the baby’s head. To cure whooping cough, ride a stud horse until he gets real hot, then let him breathe in the baby’s face. Cutting a baby’s fingernails with scissors meant he would steal, while putting his dirty diapers on the floor would give stomach pains. Colic could be cured by blowing smoke from a pipe into the baby’s diapers and onto the soft spot on top of the head. But if the top of the head was covered, the baby wouldn’t get colic in the first place.

Bitterweed

For chest colds, heat tallow and camphorated oil and rub onto chest and bottom of feet, or brown a piece of flannel to put on chest. For worms, hang a sack of garlic around the baby’s neck; to cure hernia, tape a quarter or 50-cent piece over navel. To ease the pains of teething, bore a hole in a silver dime and tie around neck with string. Bitterweed, boiled and steeped, was used to bathe a child with malaria. For diarrhea, tea made from white planton leaves was said to be effective, as well as a scorched spoonful of whiskey.
Besides the curatives, there were many practices and prohibitions to be kept in mind before and just after birth. A baby born with a veil (membrane) over its face would always see ghosts, it was thought. And don’t attract the baby’s attention from behind or above; looking back and up could cause crossed eyes. Strange sights, seen by a pregnant mother, might mark a baby, as could a mother’s strong cravings during pregnancy. If a child-bearing-age woman in her menses held a baby, it might cause bowel strain, to be cured by putting a piece of that lady’s silk underdrawers on the baby.

The baby was said to turn out to be just like the first person to take it outside and walk all the way around the house. And the nicest tradition of all was the belief that when a baby smiled in his sleep, you knew the angels were playing with him.

Even with more modern medical facilities available today, there are some elderly people in the rural reaches of West Feliciana who turn to the time-honored maxims and cures practiced through the generations. They know they can count on them to work, and they are as close as the nearest wooded field or forest or barnyard. They don’t have office hours, and they’re free. But in this wintry month, in the midst of colds and flu season, if you don’t have any hogs or hard-breathing stud horses and can’t identify bitterweed or Palm of Christian leaves, feel free to avail yourself of more modern medical facilities.

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 is open in season and is spectacular. Particularly important to tourism in the area are its two significant state historic sites, Rosedown Plantation (a National Historic Landmark) 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.

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. 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 www.stfrancisvillefestivals.com, www.stfrancisville.net or www.stfrancisville.us (the events calendar gives dates and information on special activities).

Celebrate a Country Christmas in St. Francisville

noreply@blogger.com (Blue Goose Media) — Tue, 27 Nov 2018 14:56:00 +0000

Celebrate a Country Christmas in St. Francisville
By Anne Butler
Used to be, country folks piled into wagons for a trip to the nearest town in anticipation of Christmas, the youngsters pressing noses against frost-covered storefront windows to dream of china dolls or wooden rocking horses. Today that trend has been reversed, as harried urbanites escape from mall madness and compulsive consumption to ease back into the slower pace and peace of a country Christmas. And there’s nowhere to better experience that than St. Francisville’s Christmas in the Country weekend December 7, 8 and 9th.
Spectacular holiday decorations, with millions of white lights gracing gallery posts and tracing soaring Victorian trimwork, turn the downtown Historic District into a winter wonderland, and carefully planned activities provide fun for the entire family. The theme of the Sunday afternoon Christmas parade, Walking in a Winter Wonderland, sets the tone for the whole weekend, and it’s is highly appropriate. The weekend is a safe, small-town celebration of its bedrock beliefs---in the goodness of people, the beauty of nature, and the strength of community and faith. Plus it’s just plain fun! Remember when Christmas shopping was actually a pleasure? It still is in St. Francisville, where each unique little store welcomes shoppers with Open House lagniappe: refreshments, music, and spectacular discounted sales.

Friday evening, December 7th, Christmas in the Country is kicked off around St. Francisville’s Town Hall as the children’s choir Voices in Motion from Bains Lower Elementary School sings at 5:45, followed by jovial longtime mayor Billy D’Aquilla lighting the town tree and hosting a reception complete with fireworks. Participating homes in St. Francisville’s National Register Historic District along Ferdinand and Royal Streets, designated by signs, permit visitors to Peep Into Our Holiday Homes from 6 to 8 p.m. both Friday and Saturday, and a Holly Jolly Jazzy Christmas Concert featuring Willis Delony and friends, sponsored by the St. Francisville Symphony Association with the Baton Rouge Symphony Orchestra, starts at 7 p.m. on Friday at Grace Episcopal Church, with tickets available at the door.

Saturday, December 8th, begins with 7:30 a.m. Community Prayer Breakfast at the Methodist Church Fellowship Hall, sponsored by the local church, United Methodist Men, and the Louisiana Egg Commission; guest speaker Abby Cochran is the principal of the local high school, serves on the town’s Board of Aldermen, and is co-chair of the Methodist church’s Missions Committee, evidence of her belief in the power of linking church, school and community. Christmas on the Run for the Relay for Life supporting the American Cancer Society has a one-mile fun run beginning at 8 a.m. and a 5-K run at 8:30 a.m., both starting at Parker Park.

Little ones can enjoy Breakfast with St. Nick at the First Baptist Church; sponsored by the Women’s Service League, two seatings are available at 8 and 9, with reservations encouraged and tickets available online (wslwestfel@gmail.com). The Women’s Service League also offers fresh wreaths on Ferdinand St. from 9 to 5.

In Parker Park from 10 to 4, over 65 vendors offer everything from food and music to arts and crafts; from noon to 2 there will be live music in the park featuring Blu Rouge. The Polar Express train transports visitors through the downtown area from 10 to 2, with a Polar Express movie and fun in the Town Hall meeting room.

St. Francisville’s shops and art galleries are the enthusiastic sponsors of this special weekend, offering a wide variety of inventory, from antiques (there are three sprawling antiques co-ops) and art (both original and prints), decorative items, one-of-a-kind handmade crafts, custom jewelry, housewares, artisanal foodstuffs, clothing for every member of the family. Be sure to pick up your Candy Cane Shopping Card from one of the listed shops, featuring discounts and “I Shopped St. Francisville” t-shirts for purchases over $100.

From 10 to 4 on Saturday, the non-profit organization Friends of the Library sponsors the popular annual Tour of Homes benefitting library programs, showcasing three stately homes featuring varied architecture and eclectic décor, plus a special treat this year. Right in the center of St. Francisville’s historic district beside the iconic Magnolia Café are the 3-V Tourist Cabins, throwbacks to the 1930s automobile age when a tiny garage was provided with each overnight accommodation. Used in the documentary Bonnie & Clyde, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and still renting as B&Bs, these little cabins are on tour this year as decorator showcases, each done up in style by local interior designers Ellen Kennon, Marc Charbonnet and Caroline Alberstat. Tickets are available at Eventbrite.com, the library, or at each home.

Downtown Merchants Open Houses, with music and refreshments, keep the fun and fine shopping going into the evening Saturday from 4 to 7 p.m. From 6 to 8 p.m., Oakley Plantation’s Dickens of a Christmas at Audubon State Historic Site features candlelight tours, period music and wassail. From 6 to 7 United Methodist Church hosts a Community Sing-Along. First Baptist Church (LA 10 at US 61) has a Living Nativity inside the church from 6 to 8, a real Christmas journey—travel from Nazareth to Bethlehem and rediscover the miracle of the birth of Jesus; children love the petting stable, crafts, and hot chocolate and cookies. There will also be a concert at historic Temple Sinai (Prosperity St. just off Royal) featuring Nancy Roppolo, Clay Parker and Jodie James beginning at 7 p.m.

On Sunday, December 9th, Candy Cane Shopping Card opportunities continue from 10 to closing, with T-shirt prizes available at the Visitor Center on Ferdinand St. (open 9 to 5). Vendors are in Parker Park from 10 to 4, with live music noon to 3 by the Fugitive Poets. Sunday’s highlight is the Women’s Service League Christmas Parade beginning at 2 p.m., travelling along Ferdinand and Commerce Streets, with floats, bands, marching groups, dignitaries and lots of throws, all under the theme of Walking in a Winter Wonderland.

The following week, Countdown to Christmas draws crowds to the West Feliciana Sports Park on Thursday, December 13, from 5 to 8 p.m. for more free family fun. There will be arts and crafts, bonfires, games, face painting, music and train rides. Santa will make an appearance, a Christmas tree costume contest really does mean dressing as your favorite decorated tree, and concessions and dinner will be available.

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 is open in season and is spectacular. Particularly important to tourism in the area are its two significant state historic sites, Rosedown Plantation (a National Historic Landmark) 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.

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. 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 www.stfrancisvillefestivals.com, www.stfrancisville.net or www.stfrancisville.us (the events calendar gives dates and information on special activities).