Rasberry Baptist Church

Rasberry Baptist Church was organized in 1866, just after the war, and it is the oldest independent African American church in West Feliciana Parish, because it was never tied to a plantation. The congregation rebuilt in 1873, 1890 and 1965. In the 1930s and 1940s it was bound up with a Black grade school, founded in the late 1880s, on the site now occupied by the parish jail. The school's principal, John S. Dawson, served the church as senior deacon and Sunday school superintendent. Dawson had earlier taught at Laurel Hill, another congregation's school.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Rosedown Plantation State Historic Site — 1.5 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 — 4.4 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 — 8.4 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

• Grace Episcopal Church — 0.3 mi
• British West Florida — 0.3 mi
• Courthouse — 0.3 mi
• Temple Sinai — 0.3 mi