Franklin Plantation

A Coast Survey map of 1861 put the enslaved share of Tensas Parish at 90.8 percent, and the planters' houses along Lake St. Joseph were built on that labor. Dr. Allen T. Bowie's Franklin Plantation was one of them, and Union soldiers burned the mansions facing the lake in May 1863, in Grant's Mississippi campaign. The parish held 16,078 people in 1860 and 12,419 in 1870, a drop of nearly 23 percent. The people who had cleared and planted the lakeshore were counted in both numbers, first as property and then as free.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lake Bruin State Park — 10 mi
  A state park on a Mississippi River oxbow near St. Joseph, named for a territorial judge who owned a plantation beside it, on a former fish hatchery site.
• Tensas River National Wildlife Refuge — 17 mi
  Nearly 80,000 acres of bottomland hardwood forest and oxbow lakes, with the state's largest population of Louisiana black bears and Theodore Roosevelt's 1907 hunt nearby.

More markers nearby

• Henry Watkins Allen — steps away
• Davis Plantations — 1.2 mi
• Linwood Plantation — 6.3 mi
• Winter Quarters Plantation — 7.3 mi