St. Joseph

St. Joseph began around 1813 as a store at John Densmore's Landing. In 1843, the year Tensas Parish was created, the settlers laid the town out around a village green on a New England plan, a rarity in the Deep South. The country around it was cotton land, and by 1861 about nine in ten of the parish's people were enslaved. The river made it a crossing, and early in 1865 Confederate cavalry on the far bank blocked Federal efforts to close it. Downtown along Plank Road is a National Register district, and Lake Bruin State Park starts nearby.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lake Bruin State Park — 3.4 mi
  A state park on a Mississippi River oxbow near St. Joseph, named for a territorial judge who owned a plantation beside it, on a former fish hatchery site.
• Vidalia Landing Riverfront — 27 mi
  A riverwalk on the Mississippi at Vidalia, built on the site of the old town that moved west in 1938 when the river was cut off.
• Frogmore Cotton Plantation and Gins — 33 mi
  A working cotton farm near Ferriday that tells the plantation story through the people enslaved there, with quarters, an ancient mound and a rare steam-engine gin.

More markers nearby

• Mound Plantation — 3.6 mi
• Winter Quarters Plantation — 8.0 mi
• Linwood Plantation — 8.3 mi
• Henry Watkins Allen — 13 mi