Old Burying Ground

The town takes its name from the monks. Spanish Capuchin friars wanted a burial ground on high ground and received a land grant from the king; between 1773 and 1785 they built a wooden monastery on the bluff. A settlement grew around the monastery and its cemetery and took the name of the order's patron, Saint Francis. John H. Johnson had the town chartered and platted in 1807 as La Villa de San Francisco, laying out streets and squares with little regard for the hilly ground.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Rosedown Plantation State Historic Site — 1.8 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 — 4.7 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 — 8.5 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
• British West Florida — steps away
• Grace Episcopal Church — steps away
• Bayou Sara — steps away