Travel: A Louisiana Treasure Restored
The town of St. Francisville, Louisiana, some 100 miles northwest of New Orleans, escaped major damage from Katrina and her evil sister Rita, and amid all their destruction, the hurricanes completely spared the old Oakley House there. An ambitious restoration—the first in almost 50 years—had already been underway at the West Indies-style plantation house, built in l799, and the work stayed on track even as the people of West Feliciana Parish opened their homes to some 2,000 hurricane refugees. By last month, Oakley in all its renewed Federal period splendor was once again open to the public. It’s well worth visiting.
Restoration of the exterior will be complete in plenty of time for the thirty-sixth annual Audubon Pilgrimage, March l6 through 18, 2007 (www.audubonpilgrimage.info), followed the first weekend in April by the sixth annual Audubon Country BirdFest, where birders explore this part of the Mississippi flyway (www.audubonbirdfest.com). Soon after New Year’s Day in 1821, John James Audubon left New Orleans to travel the hundred miles up the Mississippi River to Oakley. Its owner, Lucy Pirrie, had hired him to give drawing lessons to her cosseted fifteen-year-old daughter, Eliza. The artist was to tutor the girl in the morning, then have afternoons free to wander the woods in search of new species of birds to draw for the book that would become, against all odds, his magnum opus.
In four months of those afternoon sorties, Audubon drew a prodigious 32 of the 435 birds that would populate his monumental Birds of America. Then suddenly he left in a perfect snit, having argued with the formidable Mrs. Pirrie. Historic gossip has suggested that the married 36-year-old artist had made unwanted advances to his student; Audubon, thoroughly French, did have a habit of sprinkling “darlings” and “sweethearts” in his conversations with women, but almost certainly the row was over money. (Eliza fell ill, classes were cancelled, Lucy Pirrie did not relish paying for lessons not given, and Audubon was desperate for cash.)
Had the struggling artist of the l820s been able to see into the future, he would have had the last laugh. Oakley is now the centerpiece of the 100-acre Audubon State Historic Site (www.crt.state.la.us/parks/iaudubon.aspx), and St. Francisville and the surrounding West Feliciana Parish have become Audubon Central, claiming the famous artist as their own.
As well they might. Between 1821 and 1830, Audubon’s wife Lucy would teach piano in two of the local plantations to support their two sons, freeing her husband to pursue his tremendous project. Lucy’s family, and most who knew them, dismissed what he was doing as a wild goose chase. Still, Audubon was to spend almost two years in Feliciana parish drawing some 80 birds, preparing for England and fame, with Lucy straight and tall beside him. At the end of l829 he would return triumphant, to scoop her up and bask in the hard-won admiration of their many doubters.
Early in his life in America, the artist lived near Philadelphia; at the end, he had a farm on Manhattan Island. By comparison, St. Francisville is remarkably unchanged since he slept in a small back room at Oakley. Or when he walked to the public market built in 1819 along Royal Street, in what is now the protected historic district of the town. Or when he stalked a wild turkey in today’s Tunica Hills Wildlife Management Area, where you can still hear the alarmed ping of a yellow-billed cuckoo while trekking through a canopy of towering oaks and gums, along a trail that is part of the old Natchez Trace. In town, the Historical Society, on Ferdinand Street (www.stfrancisville.org), is a good place to start a walking tour.
In March, Louisiana explodes in azaleas, camellias, and crape myrtle. That is the perfect time to tour such opulent plantations as Rosedown and Afton Villa Gardens. During the Audubon Pilgrimage, local folks turn out in period costume (Empire, not antebellum) for a day at Market Hall; there are maypole dances and antiques shows and cemetery tours. The program offers “Robust Hymn Singing” at the Methodist Church and “Graveyard Tales” at Grace Episcopal one night, and a “Soiree with live music and fine food” on Royal Street the next, an event that would have delighted Audubon, who loved to dance.
“Since Katrina our beautiful parish has grown yet again in the number of home owners,” reports Ann Alston Stirling Weller, one of the stalwarts of the local historical scene. Her kin Alexander Stirling and Ann Alston were among the first settlers, sometime before l770. Lucy Pirrie was an Alston, and Ann Weller is related to Eliza “in several different ways,” she says. The old connections remain intact—yet another reason it is easy to imagine Audubon in Feliciana.