Bayou Sara was a town in West Feliciana Parish, Louisiana, United States until the Mississippi River washed it away in 1927. In the early 1800s it was the most important landing between New Orleans and Natchez, Mississippi. [1] According to the American Guide to Louisiana, Bayou Sara was "founded in 1790 by John H. Mills and Christopher Stewart, who established a trading post on the river which grew into one of the most flourishing ports between Natchez and New Orleans. With the advent of the railroad, trade diminished and the town gradually declined, so that now all that remains of Bayou Sara are a few wooden shacks and a tall, uninscribed monument, and these have been absorbed by St. Francisville." [2]
John H. Mills had originally settled in the Natchez District where he operated a sawmill in partnership with Isaac Johnson near Second Creek. [3] Mills' son Gilbert Mills married Johnson's daughter Ann Waugh Johnson. [3] In 1790 Mills moved south to the vicinity of the Bayou Sarah and in partnership with Christopher Strong Stewart opened a trading post on the batture. [3] Stewart later moved to Mobile, Spanish West Florida, where he died in 1809. [3]
John James Aububon came to Bayou Sara in 1821 and began the nature studies that became the Birds of America . [4]
The town had its own newspaper, the Bayou Sara Sun, prior to the American Civil War. [5]
West Feliciana Parish is a civil parish located in the U.S. state of Louisiana. At the 2020 census, the population was 15,310. The parish seat is St. Francisville. The parish was established in 1824.
St. Francisville is a town in and the parish seat of, West Feliciana Parish, Louisiana, United States. The population was 1,557 at the 2020 census. It is part of the Baton Rouge metropolitan statistical area.
Natchez is the only city in and the county seat of Adams County, Mississippi, United States. The population was 14,520 at the 2020 census. Located on the Mississippi River across from Vidalia, Louisiana, Natchez was a prominent city in the antebellum years, a center of cotton planters and Mississippi River trade.
Pinckney's Treaty, also known as the Treaty of San Lorenzo or the Treaty of Madrid, was signed on October 27, 1795, by the United States and Spain.
The Natchez District was one of two areas established in the Kingdom of Great Britain's West Florida colony during the 1770s – the other being the Tombigbee District. The first Anglo settlers in the district came primarily from other parts of British America. The district was recognized to be the area east of the Mississippi River from Bayou Sara in the south and Bayou Pierre in the north.
The Republic of West Florida, officially the State of Florida, was a short-lived republic in the western region of Spanish West Florida for just over 2+1⁄2 months during 1810. It was annexed and occupied by the United States later in 1810; it subsequently became part of Eastern Louisiana.
John Bennett Dawson was an American politician who served as a Democrat in the United States House of Representatives from the state of Louisiana.
John Milliken Parker Sr., was an American Democratic politician from Louisiana, who served as the state's 37th Governor from 1920 to 1924. He was a friend and admirer of U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt. He participated in the 1891 New Orleans lynchings.
Louisiana was a dominant population center in the southwest of the Confederate States of America, controlling the wealthy trade center of New Orleans, and contributing the French Creole and Cajun populations to the demographic composition of a predominantly Anglo-American country. In the antebellum period, Louisiana was a slave state, where enslaved African Americans had comprised the majority of the population during the eighteenth-century French and Spanish dominations. By the time the United States acquired the territory (1803) and Louisiana became a state (1812), the institution of slavery was entrenched. By 1860, 47% of the state's population were enslaved, though the state also had one of the largest free black populations in the United States. Much of the white population, particularly in the cities, supported slavery, while pockets of support for the U.S. and its government existed in the more rural areas.
Isaac Johnson was an American politician and the 12th Governor of the state of Louisiana.
Feliciana Parish, or New Feliciana, French: Paroisse de Félicianne, was a parish of the Territory of Orleans and the state of Louisiana, formed in 1810 from West Florida territory. Given an increase in population, it was divided in 1824 into East Feliciana Parish and West Feliciana Parish.
The Butler Greenwood Plantation is a plantation in Louisiana. It is on U.S. Route 61, 2.2 kilometers (1.4 mi) to the north of St. Francisville, Louisiana. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Louisiana Highway 66 (LA 66) is a state highway located in southeastern Louisiana. It runs 19.62 miles (31.58 km) in a general east–west direction from the main entrance of the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola to a junction with U.S. Highway 61 (US 61) north of St. Francisville.
William Walter Leake was an officer in the Confederate States Army in the American Civil War. He was also an attorney, a member of the Louisiana State Senate, a circuit court judge, a bank president, and a newspaper publisher. He is best known for his role in burying a Union Navy officer in Louisiana, an event now commemorated as "The Day the War Stopped".
Bruinsburg is an extinct settlement in Claiborne County, Mississippi, United States. Founded when the Natchez District was part of West Florida, the settlement was one of the end points of the Natchez Trace land route from Nashville to the lower Mississippi River valley.
Edward McGehee was an American judge and major planter in Wilkinson County, Mississippi. He owned nearly 1,000 slaves to work his thousands of acres of cotton land at his Bowling Green Plantation.
Live Oak is a former plantation in Weyanoke, West Feliciana Parish, Louisiana, United States. The Live Oak Plantation House is one of the first houses in the Felicianas, built in 1808 with Spanish-influenced architecture, predating the American annexation of the Republic of West Florida in 1810. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places under the name "Live Oak," as of March 11, 1977.
The Norman Studio in photography refers to the family business run principally by photographers Henry C. Norman (1850—1913) and his son Earl Norman (1888—1951) in Natchez, Mississippi between 1876 and 1951, which produced around 75,000 images documenting many significant types of events and subjects in the various small towns along the lower Mississippi River. Its output remains one of the most valuable and comprehensive visual collections documenting Southern American life during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The Mississippi River was an important military highway that bordered ten states, roughly equally divided between Union and Confederate loyalties.