Rosedown Plantation
Rosedown Plantation is one of the best-preserved and best-documented plantation gardens of early nineteenth-century Louisiana. Built and maintained with the profits from and labor of uncompensated enslaved people, the ornamental gardens of the cotton plantation synthesized local ideas about the spatial organization of agricultural and residential landscapes with picturesque principles and horticultural specimens popularized in New York and Philadelphia.
Overview
Alternate Names: Rose Down
Site Dates: 1834 to present
Site Owner(s): Martha and Daniel Turnbull (1834–1896); Sarah Turnbull Bowman (1896–1914); Nellie, Empsie, Isa, and Maggie Bowman (The Misses Bowman) (1914–1956); Milton Underwood and Catherine Fondren Underwood (1956–); Gene Raymond Slivka (1994–2000); the State of Louisiana (2000–present)
Associated People: Samuel Richardson (landscape gardener); Moses; Charles; Ben; Primus; Augustus; Dave; Jane; Jim (enslaved gardeners)
Location: St. Francisville, West Feliciana Parish, LA
Condition: altered
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History
Located several miles inland on the eastern bank of the Mississippi river, the 3,455 acres of Rosedown Plantation were formed from seven tracts of land that Daniel Turnbull (1796–1861) and Martha Hilliard Barrow Turnbull (1809–1896) purchased between 1829 and 1861. The first of these purchases, which had been owned by members of Martha’s family, already contained an existing cotton plantation built and maintained by 74 enslaved people.[1] Profits from the Turnbull’s other plantations, Inheritance, Desoto, and Styopa, helped fund the construction and upkeep of Rosedown. In the 1840s and 1850s, just under 450 enslaved people worked without pay on the largest plantations owned by Daniel and Martha Turnbull.
Texts
Images
Map
Other Resources
Louisiana State Historic Sites– Rosedown Plantation
Notes
- ↑ Nesta Jean Anderson, “Comparing Alternative Landscapes: Power Negotiations in Enslaved Communities in Louisiana and the Bahamas, an Archaeological and Historical Perspective” (PhD diss., University of Texas at Austin, 2004), 123, view on Zotero.
