Afton Villa

Afton Villa is a garden with no house. David Barrow and his second wife, Susan Woolfolk, had a Gothic Revival mansion built in 1849 and designed the formal grounds themselves. The house burned in 1963, but the gardens are still kept, and the site joined the National Register in 1983. Susan Barrow also gave land for an African American Baptist congregation, Afton Villa Baptist, which was organized in the early 1870s and later split to form Sage Hill.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Rosedown Plantation State Historic Site — 3.2 mi
  A cotton plantation worked by hundreds of enslaved people, whose names survive in an 1862 succession list; the Turnbull house and gardens, and the quarters nobody has yet found.
• Audubon State Historic Site — 5.0 mi
  Oakley House, where Audubon taught drawing and painted 32 birds in 1821, and the two cabins behind it where four Black families lived through slavery, Reconstruction and Jim Crow.
• Port Hudson State Historic Site — 12 mi
  The 48-day siege of 1863 on the Mississippi bluffs, where the Louisiana Native Guards and Captain Andre Cailloux led the first assault; earthworks, a six-mile trail and a museum.
• Louisiana State Penitentiary Museum — 15 mi
  The Angola museum outside the penitentiary gate, opened in 1997 on the history of crime and punishment in Louisiana, on ground where convicts were leased out as what 64 Parishes calls legal slave labor.

More markers nearby

• The Myrtles — 2.8 mi
• Wakefield — 3.6 mi
• Rosedown Plantation — 3.7 mi
• Lt. Commander John E. Hart — 3.8 mi