William Grant Still

Still left Woodville as a small child after his father, the town bandmaster, died, though visits to relatives kept the connection alive. His mother steered him toward medicine at Wilberforce; music won. He arranged for W. C. Handy, studied free with George Chadwick in Boston, and later held a scholarship to work with Edgar Varese. Two Guggenheim fellowships and eight honorary doctorates followed, with four ballets, nine operas and a dozen symphonic works. Dedicated to racial harmony, he was openly troubled that his audiences were almost entirely white.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Clark Creek Natural Area — 13 mi
  A 700-acre ravine preserve in the Tunica Hills with about 50 waterfalls on loess bluffs, reached by a 4.9-mile loop trail, foot traffic only.
• Louisiana State Penitentiary Museum — 21 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.
• Audubon State Historic Site — 21 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.
• Rosedown Plantation State Historic Site — 22 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.

More markers nearby

• Fort Adams — steps away
• Woodville Blues — steps away
• The Woodville Republican — steps away
• Carnot Posey Home — steps away