After the wretched evening, I did not particularly sleep well nor was I looking forward to breakfast with Connie. She was fortunately both sober and in a pretty cheerful mood, so our breakfast went by well enough. The food was also a bit better than the night before. However, I am starting to get a fondness for grits, and I am not sure what to make of this!
I had a much better feeling for Madewood by the time we left. We walked around the grounds some more a explored the old cemetery on the property. There were quite a number of Pugh graves, though these seemed to disappear by the late nineteenth century, leading me to think that at some point there were no male heirs. And that made me doubt even more Connie’s claim to be some kind of relative to the original owners of the plantation. Oh well, this is a woman who think she may also be a druid and speak in ancient Celtic incantations in her sleep.
We met the current owner of the estate, Keith Martin, as we were leaving. He was pleasant and gregarious, and John in particular had no trouble engaging him in conversation. We knew from some pictures on the wall that he had been to Oxford with Bill Clinton when both of them had been Rhodes Scholars. John somehow tested the waters on politics, and we were relieved to learn that he and his wife are staunch Democrats. In fact, she had just been on a cruise with Rachel Maddow.
We took off for Saint Francisville with the help of the GPS. It took about an hour and a half to get there driving by the outskirts of Baton Rouge. Our first stop was the Rosedown Plantation. This is a state historic park and it is most famous for its garden, one of the oldest in the country. The garden was planted about the same as the house was built in the 1840’s and has been continuously maintained since then. Like the house, the garden is basically done in a neo-classical style.
Despite temperatures which hovered near 80 today, this is still fairly early spring in this part of the world. The camellias and azaleas were coming into bloom, and there were nice displays of tulips and narcissus. I knew most of the plants, though there were a few, such as the ilex below, that were unfamiliar.
The guidebook we read had suggested that the house was not particularly memorable, but both John and I were quite taken with it. The house was still in the original family until the 1950’s, and it had most of its furnishings intact. One of the best parts was the entryway. The wallpaper here is not original, but is from the same company and era. The floor is also historically accurate: canvas painted to look like some kind of marble or linoleum. Most of the other rooms had floors covered in woven grass mats. The guide explained that these would have been covered with carpets and rugs in the winter, but that in the humid summer the rugs would have been put away and only the matting would remain. Bare wood floors, however, were not considered proper.
We found this offensive picture on the wall of one of the rooms. It is surprising how much of the “Old Folks at Home” mentality still survives in the South despite so much evidence that the “darkies” were hardly happy.
In the picture below, there is another one of the fans used to keep the insects off the food which we had seen earlier at Oak Alley. The guide said that these were first used by the British in India and then came to the South later. The child of the butler was normally the one who pulled it back and forth during the meal.
The nursery would have been home for all the children until they were roughly 14. Unlike the Creole homes, there was apparently no tradition of a “garcionierre” where unmarried males would live away from the rest of the family until marriage. However, they apparently did get their own rooms in the home at this point.
After we finished the tour, we continued on into the town of Saint Francisville. This part of Louisiana is historically closer to Florida and the rest of the South and has little French influence. It was West Florida and was a British holding for a while. It was not part, therefore, of the Louisiana Purchase. In 1810, West Florida declared itself an independent republic for some 70 odd days until American troops came in and summarily annexed it to their new state of Florida. For those couple months. Saint Francisville was its capital.
Since this was a British and then American town rather than a Creole French one, Protestant churches dominate rather than the Roman Catholic. The most imposing church in town, built on the highest spot over the river, is Grace Episcopal Church. It is done in the typical Gothic Revival of the early 19th century, but only brick instead of stone is used.
The rest of the town is pretty. It looks more like a well-to-do New England or Midwestern town than what we saw in the other parts of the state. This is the front of our hotel, the Saint Francisville Inn. It is really not as nice as the picture suggests: the rooms are in back in a motel-style structure behind the house. The house itself is used for the breakfast room and as the personal quarters of the owners’ family. Still, this house is pretty typical of homes in this little town.
We had a mediocre but inexpensive dinner at the only restaurant – more of a diner, really – open in town. I think that tourism boomed here a few years ago, but that things have been hard recently. Tomorrow, we go back to the heart of Cajun country.
