Happenings This week's events
Something Old and Something New at St. Francisville’s popular Audubon Pilgrimage
Something Old and Something New at St. Francisville’s popular Audubon Pilgrimage
By Anne Butler
The forty-ninth annual Audubon Pilgrimage March 20, 21 and 22, 2020, celebrates a southern spring in St. Francisville, the glorious garden spot of Louisiana’s English Plantation Country. For nearly half a century the sponsoring West Feliciana Historical Society has thrown open the doors of significant historic structures to commemorate artist-naturalist John James Audubon’s 1821 stay as he painted a number of his famous bird studies and tutored the daughter of Oakley Plantation’s Pirrie family, beautiful young Eliza.
Two venerable townhouses in St. Francisville’s National Register-listed downtown Historic District are featured on this year’s pilgrimage. Amidst meandering Royal Street’s significant treasures is Prospect, built in 1809; during Audubon’s tenure it was occupied by Dr. Isaac Smith, early physician, LA State Senate president and great advocate of higher education. Another public-service minded figure, Dr. O.D.Brooks, purchased Prospect in 1879. As a 16-year-old boy he saw Civil War action alongside his father, owned the Royal Hotel, had a pharmacy, and served on the School Board for three decades, facilitating establishment of the parish’s first public school.
St. Francisville’s Celebration of Rural Life Skills
It is called one of the South’s best preserved formal Victorian parlors, and the New Orleans Museum of Art now has it on permanent exhibit. Moved in its entirety from English Plantation Country in St. Francisville, it is shown not only as a perfect representation of an era in history, but also as a tribute to those skilled craftsmen, both free and enslaved, capable of creating such beauty.
St. Francisville moves optimistically into the new decade with the hiring of a new Director of Tourism who’s actually an old hand in the industry, having spent over four decades directing some of the state’s iconic attractions.