A Walking Tour of St. Francisville, Louisiana
This walking tour of St. Francisville, Louisiana takes you through one of the select few towns in America that can claim to have been a national capital - New York, Philadelphia, Washington DC, York, Pennsylvania and...St. Francisville, where the entire district is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Perched atop a bluff on the eastern shore of the Mississippi River, St. Francisville, the second-oldest incorporated town in Louisiana, began life as a burial ground. Spanish Capuchin monks established a church in the 1730s across the river in a floodplain that made burial impossible. The monks rowed across the Mississippi to the drier higher ground to inter their dead. The Cappuchine friars obtained a land grant from the King of Spain and constructed a wooden monastery near the graveyard which they named for the order’s gentle patron, St. Francis. The monastery later burned but the name remained.
When the United States negotiated for the purchase of the Louisiana Territory in 1803 a section of land, including this area, along the Gulf Coast was retained by Spain. By that time the mostly American settlers had no interest in living under Spanish rule and waited restlessly while negotiations for what was called West Florida dragged on between the Spanish and the Jefferson administration.
Finally in 1810 a group of planters marched on the Spanish fort at Baton Rouge, captured the governor and set up their own nation, The Free and Independent Republic of West Florida. St. Francisville became the national capital. West Florida had a constitution based largely on the US Constitution with three branches of government. The first and only governor was Fulwar Skipwith, a former American diplomat who helped negotiate the Louisiana Purchase.
The Republic of West Florida lasted 90 days. On October 27, 1810 the United States annexed the region by proclamation of President James Madison as part of the Louisiana Purchase. At first Skipwith and the West Florida government were opposed to the proclamation but the appearance of the United States Army in St. Francisville changed their minds.
Meanwhile, below the bluffs a rowdier rivertown was growing up. Bayou Sara, named for a creek that offered flatboaters safe anchorage, was developing into the largest port on the Mississippi between Natchez and New Orleans by 1850. But fire, the Civil War, floods, the railroads and the destructive power of the boll weevil conspired to doom Bayou Sara.
St. Francisville meanwhile trundled on as the genteel center of the surrounding plantation country. It was said that two out of every three known millionaires of the antebellum period lived on the Great Road from New Orleans to Natchez and many of them were found in West Feliciana Parish and St. Francisville. Several of th grandest plantations are open to the public today.
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