From Family Operation to Centralization: A History of St. Rosalie Plantation from the Postbellum Era through the Early Twentieth Century

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Like many planters in the economically-ravaged postbellum South, Andrew Durnford’s family fell on hard times following the Civil War. Measures were taken to try to save their sugar plantation; however, following two crevasses and multiple U.S. Marshal’s Sales, St. Rosalie was seized and sold at public auction in 1874, ending the Durnford tenure of over four decades. During the next several years, agricultural operations were handled by absentee partnerships and lessees before the property’s 1881 sale to Theodore S. Wilkinson, who added it to the Plaquemines Parish “sugar empire” that he amassed along the west bank of the Mississippi River. Records indicate that the labor force employed at St. Rosalie during the examined decades ranged from freed enslaved persons of the Durnford era to tenant farmers, both white and African American, in later years.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2025

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow