British West Florida

For the people who settled here, the change of flags meant land. By 1785 so many settlers held Spanish grants that Spain organized the district of Nueva Feliciana, covering today's Florida Parishes. Settlers took up the grants, among them Ruffin Gray, a Natchez planter who held the land where Oakley's house began (his widow Lucy finished it), and David Bradford, a Pennsylvanian who built what became The Myrtles on about 600 acres in 1796. Both grants became plantations worked by enslaved people.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Rosedown Plantation State Historic Site — 1.7 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 — 4.6 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 — 8.4 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

• Courthouse — steps away
• Grace Episcopal Church — steps away
• Old Burying Ground — steps away
• Temple Sinai — steps away