Wakefield

Wakefield is private land, so what is known comes from paper. Lewis Stirling's house went up in the early 1830s, among the parish's first Greek Revival mansions. A 2013 University of Delaware thesis uses two lawsuits over its construction to show how hard the job proved: builders from the Northeast brought new methods, and managing labor ran past what either side expected. Stirling's papers at LSU record labor trouble with freedpeople after 1860 and the family's wartime stay in Texas. A descendant of people enslaved here has traced her Morgan, Weathers and Sterling ancestors to the place.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Rosedown Plantation State Historic Site — 6.3 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 — 6.3 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 — 14 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 — 16 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

• Afton Villa — 3.6 mi
• The Myrtles — 6.1 mi
• Rosedown Plantation — 6.7 mi
• Lt. Commander John E. Hart — 6.9 mi