Beth Israel Cemetery

Two peddlers, Jacob Schwartz and Jacob Cohen, bought this plot in 1848 so a fellow peddler, Henry Brugance, could have a Jewish burial. Woodville's Jewish merchants later won seats on the school board and the council, and twelve of fifty-six leaders profiled by the local paper in 1904 were Jewish. Four households had held two to four enslaved people each in 1860. The boll weevil and the cotton slump drained the congregation, which sold its synagogue in the mid-1920s. The last burial came in 1973, and a Friends of Beth Israel Cemetery fund began in 2022.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Clark Creek Natural Area — 12 mi
  A 700-acre ravine preserve in the Tunica Hills with about 50 waterfalls on loess bluffs, reached by a 4.9-mile loop trail, foot traffic only.
• Audubon State Historic Site — 20 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.
• Louisiana State Penitentiary Museum — 20 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.
• Rosedown Plantation State Historic Site — 21 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.

More markers nearby

• The Woodville Republican — 0.5 mi
• Carnot Posey Home — 0.6 mi
• Woodville Blues — 0.6 mi
• William Grant Still — 0.7 mi