History and Archaeology of the St. Rosalie Plantation, from its Founding through Emancipation

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "The Plantation in the Right-of-Way: Data Recovery at St. Rosalie Plantation, Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

The antebellum history of St. Rosalie plantation presents an intricate socioeconomic tapestry woven with threads of race and class relationships. In many ways, St. Rosalie is typical of Plaquemines Parish settlements before the Civil War, one of several sugar-producing plantations downriver from New Orleans worked by large, enslaved populations. Aspects of its history set St. Rosalie apart from its contemporaries, however, with perhaps the most prominent being its establishment by a free man of color and his bi-racial family.

This paper traces the early history of the St. Rosalie property, from the initial French colonial land purchases, through the early nineteenth century founding of the sugar plantation by Andrew Durnford, to the passing of the land from the Durnford family’s hands during Reconstruction. Recent excavations by Goodwin & Associates provide a small material dataset to examine aspects of life at St. Rosalie during these complex historical periods.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• The Plantation in the Right-of-Way: Data Recovery at St. Rosalie Plantation, Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2025

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow