Bayou Sara

Bayou Sara was the working half of a pair. The town on the bluff held the courthouse and churches, while the landing below handled the cotton, and it even had its own newspaper, the Bayou Sara Sun, before the Civil War. A railroad later drew off trade, and floods and fires took what was left. In 1927 the Mississippi washed the town away. A few surviving buildings were moved uphill in the 1920s, and what remained of the settlement was absorbed into St. Francisville.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Rosedown Plantation State Historic Site — 1.9 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 — 4.8 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 — 8.5 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 — 18 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

• Old Burying Ground — steps away
• West Feliciana Railroad — steps away
• Courthouse — steps away
• British West Florida — steps away