William Bartram Trail

William Bartram was a naturalist, not a soldier or a settler. His journey ran from March 1773 to January 1777, funded by the London botanist John Fothergill, and in 1775 it reached Louisiana, where his westernmost stop was Pointe Coupee. His book, Travels, published in 1791, includes passages on the Amite River and on Manchac, and a Baton Rouge settlement. The Bartram Trail Conference, founded in 1976, works to identify and mark his route across the Southeast, so a sign beside the Amite is one stop on a trail that crosses eight states.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Tickfaw State Park — 14 mi
  A floodplain park on the Tickfaw River, with cypress-tupelo swamp, bottomland hardwoods and about 4.75 miles of trails and boardwalks, plus a nature center with an 800-gallon river aquarium.
• LSU Rural Life Museum — 17 mi
  Four slave cabins moved from Welham Plantation and a working-plantation row of more than twenty saved buildings, on land the Burden family held as Windrush plantation since the 1830s.
• Old State Capitol — 22 mi
  James Dakin's 1850 Gothic castle on the river bluff, gutted in the Civil War, nearly demolished in 1991 and reopened in 1994 as a free museum of political history.
• Capitol Park Museum — 22 mi
  The Louisiana State Museum in Baton Rouge: a shrimp trawler and a Civil War submarine, galleries on the slave market, resistance and Jim Crow, and the music from Armstrong to Chenier.

More markers nearby

• Galveztown — 2.4 mi
• French Settlement — 3.9 mi
• Cal Ripken, Sr. — 8.0 mi
• The Civil War — 8.1 mi