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Discover Mid-America — May 2008

Tracking Audubon in Louisiana

Before he became a world-famous bird artist and naturalist, John James Audubon lived for years in poverty. While he struggled to capture every bird in America on canvas, Audubon worked a variety of odd jobs to keep paint on his palette and food on his plate.

As an illegitimate son of a Frenchman and his Creole mistress, Audubon had been reared by a Quaker family. His background left him with a vocabulary laced with “thee’s” and “thou’s,” and a need to prove himself worthy of respect. After years of work, his massive Birds of America, published in 1826 in England and containing more than 400 life-size bird images, was called the greatest picture book ever produced. It established his reputation.

But in the summer of 1821, Audubon found himself in St. Francisville, LA, the guest of Lucretia “Lucy” Pirrie and her husband, James, owners of nearby Oakley Plantation. For the next four months, Audubon would tutor their daughter Eliza in “drawing, music, dancing, arithmetic, and trifling acquirements such as (plaiting) hair.” Audubon’s contract allowed him time to hunt in the surrounding woods and complete 32 paintings that would become part of the book.

Located in West Feliciana Parish, which in 1821 was still part of Spanish Florida, St. Francisville occupied steep and rugged Mississippi River bluffs. Below, where a large creek emptied into the river, was Bayou Sara, a bustling and rowdy river town. Steamboats by the hundreds docked at Bayou Sara, where cargo was put off at docks to be transferred to the newly built Feliciana Railroad or shipped up the bayou on smaller boats. Money made in Bayou Sara found its way to St. Francisville, where entrepreneurs built fashionable houses. If Bayou Sara residents felt the need to worship in church or bury their dead in a decent cemetery, they had to go to St. Francisville.

One of the steamboats from New Orleans brought Audubon and his student-helper, a 13-year-old boy named Joseph Mason, to Bayou Sara. They would be met by James Pirrie and escorted to Oakley Plantation, well away from the noisy bustle of the rowdy river town.

By 1821, the Oakley Plantation had seen its share of illness and death. Its original owner, Ruffin Gray, a Natchez planter, died in 1799 when the house was still in the planning stage. His widow, Lucy Alston, supervised the completion of the house and the management of the plantation. Two of her children with Gray died in infancy. She married a Scot, James Pirrie, soon afterward, and lost two more children in infancy. Their daughter, Eliza, was born in 1805. In 1817, her only son, Ruffin, died at the age of 22. By all accounts, Lucy was strong and resourceful, and the real boss of Oakley as Audubon was to discover during his brief stay.

Over the years the house went through four generations of the same family and eventually was sold to the state of Louisiana. Unlike most historic showplaces, it contains many of the actual furnishings used by the residents while they lived there. Today, surrounded by ancient live oaks, magnolias and crape myrtle trees, it is part of the Audubon State Historic Site.

When I first visited Oakley two years ago, the guides offered a “warts and all” approach, describing the hard lives of the slaves that worked there and the differences that divided the family. One of the guides, a young woman, also described Audubon’s prickly relationship with Lucy Pirrie.

“Audubon’s contract allowed him to spend half his time teaching Eliza,” she said. “The rest of the time he was free to roam the woods and work on his paintings.”

The arrangement worked well for the better part of three months, although Audubon’s relationship with Lucy was often tense. In his book John James Audubon, the Making of an American, Richard Rhodes described an awkward incident that occurred about halfway through the artist’s stay at Oakley.

Lucy woke Audubon, insisting that he accompany her to a “dying neighbor’s house.” By the time they got there, the man had died. Audubon related that he “had the displeasure of keeping his body company the remainder of the night,” but was able to “make a good sketch of his head” while “the ladies engaged in preparing the ceremonial dinner.”

In Rhodes’ book, Audubon described James as weak and given to strong drink. He said Lucy doted on her daughter and admitted that he fixed up Eliza’s drawings to please her mother. Another problem for Audubon was Lucy’s other daughter, Mary Ann, who was said to dislike the artist. Supposedly, Audubon felt the same way about her.

Eliza took ill in September, which increased the tension in the household. A doctor ordered the girl confined to her bed and advised her to avoid any exertion, including drawing.

This complicated an already difficult situation for Audubon, who spent more of his time with his ornithology, much to Lucy’s increasing annoyance. When Audubon billed the Pirrie’s for the time Eliza had been sick, Lucy “in a perfect rage told me that I had cheated her.”

Confronted with the original agreement, Mrs. Pirrie allowed Audubon to stay at Oakley Plantation for eight or ten days and finish his work “but only as a visitor.”

By the time Audubon left Oakley Plantation, the women of the house treated him with open disdain, although James Pirrie and his son-in-law, Jedediah Smith were cordial, even lending horses to Audubon and Mason for their departure to Bayou Sara. Audubon wrote that he and his student were happy to “leave this abode of unfortunate opulence.”

For the next two years, Audubon worked as an itinerant painter in New Orleans and later in Natchez, MS to support himself and his ambitious Birds of America project. Full size oil paintings went for $50 and miniatures for $30. He spent much of his time in the Natchez area, and it is said that he taught dancing to a class in Woodville about 30 miles north of St. Francisville.

Audubon’s wife, also named Lucy, had supported her husband’s Birds of America project by working in Louisville, KY. In 1823, she would teach at Beech Woods, a plantation not far from St. Francisville. Audubon joined her and their two sons, and was hired by the plantation owner, Jane Percy, to teach “music and drawing” to her daughters.

Beech Woods has been gone for decades and Bayou Sara is a ghost town now, the victim of floods, fires and boll weevil infestations, which destroyed the cotton trade. But St. Francisville is a treasure of historic homes, with more than a dozen plantation homes within a day’s drive, including Oakley.

The information center, operated by the West Feliciana Historical Society, contains old photos, maps, books and artifacts of the town’s glory days, and chronicles the demise of Bayou Sara. Visitors can take a ferry at the site of the old river town and cross over to New Roads, where more plantation homes await.

For more information, visit www.nps.gov/history/nr/travel/louisiana/okl.htm

Ken Weyand can be reached at kweyand1@kc.rr.com

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