William Bartram Trail

William Bartram's southern journey was paid for by the British botanist John Fothergill, who wanted plants and drawings from the colonies. Bartram spent four years, 1773 to 1777, in Georgia, Florida and the Cherokee country, and in 1775 went no farther west than Pointe Coupee. His book Travels, published in 1791, describes the bluff at Baton Rouge, the Amite River and Manchac. It is now counted among the foremost American natural history books of its time, and it reached poets as far off as Wordsworth and Coleridge.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Rosedown Plantation State Historic Site — 8.2 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 — 11 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 — 12 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

• St. Mary's Cemetery — 3.8 mi
• Julien Poydras — 3.9 mi
• Lieutenant General John Archer Lejeune — 4.0 mi
• Lieutenant General Russel L. Honoré — 4.0 mi