Julien Poydras

When Julien Poydras died in 1824 he held more than 1,000 enslaved people on his plantations in Pointe Coupee and West Baton Rouge. In April 1795 enslaved people on his estate planned to burn a shed, ambush the planters who came to fight the fire, and rise across the parish. Spanish authorities tried 57 enslaved people and three white men; 23 of the enslaved were hanged and their heads set on posts along the river. About a dozen of Poydras's own laborers were implicated, which sits badly with his reputation as a gentle master.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Rosedown Plantation State Historic Site — 8.2 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.
• Port Hudson State Historic Site — 9.0 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.
• Audubon State Historic Site — 10 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 — 21 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

• Lieutenant General John Archer Lejeune — steps away
• Major General Delesseps S. "Chep" Morrisson — steps away
• Lieutenant General Russel L. Honoré — steps away
• John Archer LeJeune — 0.3 mi