Mississippi River

New Roads has moved more than once. French settlers began a trading post on the river in 1719, and the community was called Poste de Pointe Coupee. In 1772 the Spanish governor moved the settlement after repeated floods, and around 1776 the Spanish built the Chemin Neuf, the New Road, linking the Mississippi to False River. Most of the labor that built the settlement was enslaved, brought from the French West Indies and Africa, and enslaved people at New Roads began the 1791 Mina conspiracy. The ferry from this landing ended with the 2011 flood.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Rosedown Plantation State Historic Site — 3.5 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 — 6.1 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 — 7.9 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 — 19 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

• Captain Bennett Landing — 0.9 mi
• West Feliciana Railroad — 1.6 mi
• Bayou Sara — 1.7 mi
• Temple Sinai — 1.8 mi