St. Mary's Cemetery

Julien Poydras was among the dead moved here. He died in 1824, and his remains were taken to New Roads in 1891 after the old cemetery eroded into the Mississippi. His will directed that the enslaved people on each plantation be freed after twenty-five years and not be sold apart from their land. Accounts differ on why it failed: one says later owners ignored it and his nephew Benjamin sued for court-ordered annual payments, another that a law ending manumission kept them enslaved until Union troops arrived in 1863.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Rosedown Plantation State Historic Site — 7.8 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.
• Port Hudson State Historic Site — 8.8 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.
• Audubon State Historic Site — 10 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.
• Louisiana State Penitentiary Museum — 21 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

• John Archer LeJeune — 0.3 mi
• Louisiana Supreme Court Chief Justice Catherine D. "Kitty" Kimball — 0.3 mi
• Lieutenant General John Archer Lejeune — 0.3 mi
• Lieutenant General Russel L. Honoré — 0.3 mi