Captain Bennett Landing

Ferdinand Street ends at the river here, and this landing was the St. Francisville end of a crossing to New Roads in Pointe Coupee Parish. The ferry began with privately owned tugs and later moved to state-operated boats. It carried cars across the Mississippi for decades, until the John James Audubon Bridge opened in June 2011 and carried Highway 10 over the river instead. Accounts differ on the last year of service, 2011 or 2012. Captain Philip Morris Bennett Sr., who piloted the crossing from 1930 to 1965, gives the landing its name.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Rosedown Plantation State Historic Site — 2.7 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 — 5.5 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 — 8.3 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

• West Feliciana Railroad — 0.7 mi
• Bayou Sara — 0.8 mi
• Mississippi River — 0.9 mi
• Old Burying Ground — 0.9 mi