Rosedown Plantation

Rosedown's story did not end with emancipation. Daniel Turnbull, who held 444 people in bondage across his plantations, died in 1861, the year Louisiana seceded. The war damaged the property, and his widow Martha ran it afterward with about 250 sharecroppers, since it could no longer rely on enslaved labor. She died in 1896. After the last Turnbull heir died in 1955, Catherine and Milton Underwood bought it in 1956 and spent eight years and a reported $10 million restoring the house and gardens, while the land ran as a cattle farm. The state bought it in 2000.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Rosedown Plantation State Historic Site — 0.5 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 — 3.5 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 — 8.7 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

• Lt. Commander John E. Hart — 0.3 mi
• Rasberry Baptist Church — 1.1 mi
• The Myrtles — 1.2 mi
• Grace Episcopal Church — 1.3 mi