Temple Sinai

German-Jewish merchants came to St. Francisville in the 1850s, led by Julius Freyhan, who opened a dry goods store and later left $8,000 for a public school. In 1893 a committee of 23, chaired by grocer Adolph Teutsch, began planning a synagogue. The congregation incorporated in 1901 under livery stable owner Ben Mann, and the temple was dedicated in January 1903 before Jewish and non-Jewish townspeople. A string of short-tenure rabbis and families leaving for larger cities ended regular services by 1920, and a Presbyterian congregation bought the building the next year. Freyhan's Hebrew Rest cemetery remains.

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 — 4.6 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 — 8.3 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

• British West Florida — steps away
• Courthouse — steps away
• Grace Episcopal Church — steps away
• Old Burying Ground — steps away