|
|
Travel News
|
Friends in St. Francisville, Louisiana
|
-
Butler Greenwood - Audubon Pilgrimage
 BUTLER GREENWOOD PLANTATION ONE OF FEATURES ON ANNUAL AUDUBON PILGRIMAGE IN ST. FRANCISVILLE, LA
By Anne Butler
Samuel Flower was one of the earliest English settlers in the St. Francisville area, a Quaker physician who emigrated from Pennsylvania in the 1770’s when the area was British territory; later, when Spain gained control, he treated Governor Manuel Gayoso. When Dr. Flower died in 1813, his eight heirs would divide thousands of arpents of land in the Felicianas, Rapides Parish, along Bayou Manchac, and in the Mississippi Territory. The family residence bordering Bayou Sara, appraised in the estate division at $12,300, was left to Dr. Flower’s 20-year-old married daughter Harriett. Now known as Butler Greenwood Plantation, the property is still owned and occupied by direct descendants of the original family and will be one of the featured tour homes on the Audubon Pilgrimage March 19, 20 and 21, 2010, as the West Feliciana Historical Society opens the doors to antebellum mansions and glorious gardens in celebration of artist John James Audubon’s stay in the parish in 1821.
 This 39th annual pilgrimage, the major fundraiser supporting society preservation projects, also marks the bicentennial celebration of the West Florida Republic, whereby the Anglo-American settlers wrested the area from Spanish control to belatedly join the United States in the winter of 1810. Harriett Flower’s husband, Judge George Mathews, was a superior court judge in the Mississippi Territory and then the Territory of Orleans, appointed by President Jefferson, and would become the chief justice of the Louisiana State Supreme Court once Louisiana became a state in 1812. His father, General George Mathews, was a Revolutionary War hero who survived being bayoneted nine times to become a US Congressman and governor of Georgia, and during the international political wrangling over just where the eastern boundary of the Louisiana Purchase might be, he was sent by President Madison to Mobile and St. Augustine to keep an eye on the situation and maybe even foment a rebellion there in hopes of annexing to the United States all of East Florida as well as West.
 Harriett and George Mathews lived at Butler Greenwood and raised indigo, cotton, sugarcane and corn, shipping the crops from their own dock on Bayou Sara and extending their landholdings to include a productive sugar plantation in Lafourche Parish that, according to Lewis Gray’s figures, placed them among the top 9% of sugar planters in the state in the 1850’s. After the death of Judge Mathews in 1836, his widow continued to run the plantations with help from her son Charles.
In the census of 1860, both Harriett and her son list their occupations as “planter,” their household including Charles’ wife Penelope Stewart, their children, an Austrian music teacher and an Irish gardener, with 96 slaves living in 18 dwellings and their personal estate valued at $260,000. In that year the 1400 acres of Butler Greenwood Plantation produced 130 bales of cotton, 2000 bushels of corn, 175 hogsheads of sugar and more than 10,000 gallons of molasses. Their other plantations covered nearly 10,000 acres worked by some 400 slaves and were equally productive in 1860, although after the Civil War the labor force had fallen to a field gang of only 27 freedmen working for monthly wages on the home place.
 Now the home of the seventh and eighth generation of the family, Butler Greenwood is a simple, raised cottage-style plantation home filled with family treasures—oil portraits, Brussels carpet, gilded pier mirrors, Mallard poster beds, fine china and silverware, a French Pleyel grand piano, and the area’s finest original Victorian formal parlor, its twelve matching pieces still in the original upholstery. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places since 1979, the house is surrounded by extensive groves of live oaks and formal gardens filled with ancient camellias and sasanquas, sweet olive and magnolia fuscata grown to...
-
Living History - St. Francisville
LIVING HISTORY REALLY LIVES AT OAKLEY PLANTATION NEAR ST. FRANCISVILLE, LA
by Anne Butler
 Many restored historic sites glibly promise to make history come alive for visitors, but that feat is easier said than done. One property that does indeed fulfill its promise, with both style and accuracy, is Oakley Plantation in the Audubon State Historic Site just south of St. Francisville, LA. That it can do so, and do it so well, is a testament to the stubborn endurance of the site itself as well as to the present-day stewards’ acute awareness of history.
For one thing, Oakley remained in the multiple generations of the same family for nearly 150 years, its residents wise enough not to embellish its simple elegance with inappropriate modern intrusions, so that this wonderful early home with its sensible West Indies architecture was not turned into a velvet-upholstered chandelier-lit McMansion. The Oakley house thus retained its original character and ambience into the mid-twentieth century, unadulterated by such modern conveniences as electricity or indoor plumbing. The post-Civil War impoverishment of the surrounding rural countryside, its cotton plantations no longer profitable, was another factor that helped protect Oakley’s woodlands from the creeping concrete of industrial development that too often encroaches upon historic sites elsewhere in the name of progress.
 After the last descendant with connections to the original family, elderly spinster Lucy Matthews, left Oakley for a nursing home, the house (unpainted and covered with vines following a period of emptiness) and 100 surrounding acres were acquired by the state. This acquisition, for $10,000 in 1947, was thanks to the efforts of the area’s longtime gentleman-statesman, white-maned Representative Davis Folkes, with encouragement from local preservationists—foremost among them the Misses Mamie and Sarah Butler, Mrs. Josie Stirling, Mrs. Rita Poche and her sister Hilda Moss--and the determined ladies of the DAR, who saw to it that the property was properly inventoried, restored and appropriately furnished with fine Federal period pieces.
Another dedicated local state legislator, Rep. Tom McVea, struggled to save Oakley once again during the 2009 legislative session, when funding for historic sites was slashed to the bone; unfortunately, the budget struggle continues this year, with little recognition of the importance of tourism to the region’s faltering economy. Oakley, in fact, for the half-century it has been open to the public, has attracted an international crowd of visitors to the St. Francisville area, primarily due to its 1820s associations with artist-naturalist John James Audubon, whose imagination and admiration were excited by the lush landscape and flourishing birdlife. Though his stay at Oakley was short, Audubon would draw dozens of his ornithological studies there as he undertook the staggering task of painting from life all the birds of America. The artist would draw more birds in Louisiana than in any other place, and even today the birding checklist for the area still includes more than 150 species.
 Oakley is always one of the most popular features of the Audubon Pilgrimage, sponsored every spring by the West Feliciana Historical Society as its major fundraiser supporting preservation projects. This year’s tour, March 19, 20 and 21, also marks the bicentennial celebration of the West Florida Republic, culmination of the rebellion whereby the Anglo-American settlers of the Florida Parishes wrested the area from Spanish control to belatedly join Louisiana as part of the United States in the winter of 1810. The first mistress of Oakley Plantation, Lucretia Alston Gray Pirrie, was the sister-in-law of Alexander Stirling, at whose plantation the first organizational meeting of dissidents took place.
The Oakley house, a splendid towering three-story structure with the jalousied galleries that made 19th-century Louisiana summers bearable, was well established by the time Irish-born traveler Fortescue Cuming visited the area in 1809, recording in his travelogue “Sketches of a Tour to the Western Country” a visit to Lucretia and James Pirrie’s plantation, reached via “a good road through a forest abounding with that beautiful and...
( MB )
|
|
Local News & Travel Feeds
|
