The Myrtles

The ghost stories came later; the record is plainer. David Bradford, a participant in the Whiskey Rebellion, built the house in 1796 and was pardoned in 1799. Census counts list 5 enslaved people in the Woodruff household in 1820 and 32 in 1830. The Chloe legend, a poisoning by an enslaved woman, has no record behind it: nothing shows the Woodruffs held a Chloe, and Sara Woodruff and two children died of yellow fever. The one documented killing is William Winter's, on the porch in 1871. Historian Tiya Miles ties the Chloe legend to violence against Black women.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Rosedown Plantation State Historic Site — 0.9 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 — 4.3 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 — 9.9 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 — 17 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 — 1.1 mi
• Rosedown Plantation — 1.2 mi
• Rasberry Baptist Church — 1.7 mi
• Grace Episcopal Church — 1.9 mi