Saint Francisville trip planner

St. Francisville is a town in and the parish seat of West Feliciana Parish, Louisiana, United States. The population was 1,712 at the 2000 census. It is part of the Baton Rouge Metropolitan Statistical Area.GeographySt. Francisville is located at. According to the United States Census Bureau, the town has a total area of 1.8 square miles (4.7 km²), all land.HistoryThe town of St. Francisville was established in 1809 and a number of historic structures from that period still exist. Called "the town two miles long and two yards wide" because it was developed atop a narrow ridge overlooking the Mississippi River, it was the commercial and cultural center of the surrounding plantation country. Below St. Francisville's bluffs, another early settlement called Bayou Sara had been established in the early 1790s and was at one time before the Civil War the largest shipping port on the Mississippi River between New Orleans and Memphis. Destroyed by repeated flooding and fires, nothing exists of Bayou Sara today, but a few of its structures were hauled up the hill into St. Francisville in the 1920s.Years of contention as to exactly where the eastern boundary of the 1803 Louisiana Purchase was, depending on which treaty was cited as France and England and Spain shifted the territory among themselves, allowed Spain to continue to claim St. Francisville and territory on the eastern side of the Mississippi River which is today called the Florida Parishes. In 1810 St. Francisville served as the capital of the Republic of West Florida as the local planters ousted the Spanish government and set up their own independent republic for a grand total of 74 days before being annexed to the rest of Louisiana as part of the United States.