Samuel Arrives in Plaquemines Parish by 1822 and Begins Working at the Pointe Celeste Plantation of the Wilkinsons

I’ve discussed Samuel K. Green’s life from the time he arrived in south Louisiana by 1822 in quite a bit of detail in several previous postings (see here, here, here, here, here, and here). As the linked postings show, testimony provided by Joseph Biddle Wilkinson and his wife Catherine Andrews Wilkinson in the lawsuit filed by Samuel’s son Ezekiel against his father in Pointe Coupee Parish, Louisiana, in March 1856 indicates that Samuel had begun working as an overseer on the Wilkinsons’ Pointe Celeste sugarcane plantation in Plaquemines Parish by 1822.[1] Catherine Wilkinson’s testimony, given on 6 March 1857, states that Samuel K. Green worked for her husband from 1822 to 1825. On the same day, her husband Joseph testified that he employed Samuel K. Green from 1823 to 1825. I suspect Catherine’s 1822 date is correct, since her testimony corroborates what Samuel’s disappearance from Nashville records after 1822 suggests: that he left Nashville in 1821 or 1822. His decision to relocate to south Louisiana makes sense when one considers that he had spent the years from 1815 to 1821 or 1822 engaged in the Nashville-New Orleans trade first with keel and flat boats and then with the steamboat General Jackson, which he piloted — apparently more than once — from Tennessee to New Orleans.

Those jaunts would no doubt have connected Samuel to people in New Orleans who helped him find an employer when he relocated to New Orleans in the early 1820s. Pointe Celeste, the plantation owned by Joseph B. and Catherine Andrews Wilkinson, was some 35-40 miles down the Mississippi River south of New Orleans. The Wilkinsons acquired Pointe Celeste in 1819 from New Orleans merchant Maunsel White.[2] White had named the plantation after his wife Elizabeth Céleste Denys de la Ronde.[3]

The two close-up snapshots above taken from John La Tourette’s 1853 Reference Map of the State of Louisiana show the location of the Wilkinsons’ Pointe Celeste plantation in relation to New Orleans (note the highlighted areas showing New Orleans and Pointe Celeste downriver from it on the first map), as well as showing the relation of Pointe Celeste to Maunsel White’s Deer Range plantation just upriver and George Bradish’s Magnolia plantation just downriver from Pointe Celeste (see the second map).[4] Testimony in the Green vs. Green case in Pointe Coupee Parish states, as I’ll discuss later, that after working as an overseer for the Wilkinsons, Samuel K. Green then worked for Bradish.

The Maunsel White-Wilkinson Connection

The link between Joseph B Wilkinson and Maunsel White is noteworthy. In addition to being a merchant in New Orleans, White operated sugarcane plantations in Plaquemines Parish; in fact, as I’ve just noted, his primary plantation there, Deer Range, was just upriver from Pointe Celeste plantation. If I had to guess at a connection Samuel K. Green had made in New Orleans prior to his move to south Louisiana that led to his employment by 1822 on the Wilkinsons’ Pointe Celeste sugarcane plantation in Plaquemines Parish, I’d guess that this connection was Maunsel White.

White was an Irish native who had lived in Louisville before settling in Plaquemines Parish and establishing a trading firm in New Orleans. Newspapers in New Orleans and elsewhere in the period leading up to the 1820s carry notices showing him actively trading with both Louisville and Nashville. Of particular interest is a 20 February 1822 notice published on 27 March in Nashville’s National Banner and Nashville Whig, in which Charles Buchanan and John Johnston announced that they had set up a trading firm in Florence, Alabama, and in which they cited references including Maunsel White of New Orleans and Thomas Yeatman of Nashville, the latter one of the agents of the General Jackson in the period 1819-1821 along with Samuel K. Green and John Young.[5] As the previous posting, which I’ve just linked, notes, Byrd Douglas thinks that Young and Green sold the General Jackson to Thomas Yeatman by or in 1820.

I suspect his jaunts to New Orleans in the period 1816-1822 may well have connected Samuel K. Green to Maunsel White, and that it may have been White who placed Samuel in contact with Joseph Biddle Wilkinson as Samuel relocated to south Louisiana in 1821-2 and sought employment there. White, Wilkinson, and Samuel K. Green were contemporaries: Maunsel White was born in 1783, Joseph B. Wilkinson in 1789, and Samuel K. Green in 1790. All three were very much the “young men on the make” (or perhaps by the early 1820s in the case of these three men, youngish men on the make) described by Anita Shafer in her history of early Nashville cited in the previous posting.[6] They would have shared ties not only as members of the same generation seeking to establish themselves in lucrative businesses, but also through the New Orleans-to-Nashville trade in which both Samuel K. Green and Maunsel White were involved, a key commodity of which was sugar produced from cane grown in south Louisiana: note the ads below from New Orleans’ Times-Picayune on 3 January 1847 and Louisville’s Daily Courier on 28 May 1851 advertising sugar produced at Pointe Celeste, the first of these two ads placed by Maunsel White’s firm.[7]

It’s also worth pointing out that Maunsel White was a close friend of Andrew Jackson, who was also closely connected to one of the first co-owners of the General Jackson, William Carroll. Maunsel White was, in fact, Andrew Jackson’s cotton factor in New Orleans.[8] White served under Jackson in the battle of New Orleans during the War of 1812. Joseph B. Wilkinson also had a military background, also serving during the War of 1812, in Wilkinson’s case as a Naval officer.[9] I have no proof of any connection between Samuel K. Green and Maunsel White, but there are many indicators that tempt me to think it was a connection between these two men, formed during the period in which Samuel was involved in the Nashville-New Orleans trade and making visits to New Orleans, that placed Samuel in touch with the Wilkinsons when he went to Louisiana and the Wilkinsons hired him to work as an overseer on their Pointe Celeste plantation by 1822.

Information about the Pointe Celeste Plantation

Detailed historical information about the Pointe Celeste plantation is surprisingly difficult to find. I have not been able to find information indicating whether Pointe Celeste was an already functioning sugarcane plantation at the time Maunsel White acquired it and then sold it to the Wilkinsons in 1819, and whether a dwelling house for the owners had been built on the plantation by that point. Writing in 1917, James Wilkinson, a grandson of Joseph Biddle Wilkinson, stated,[10]

The old original home of my grand father on the Pointe Celeste plantation, 40 miles below New Orleans, was burned down by its owner to kill the yellow fever germs of several persons who died there after the civil war.

Since James Wilkinson was a grandson of Joseph B. Wilkinson, he was writing here about a house that had belonged to his grandfather, but, since it was burned after the Civil War, it was one of the subsequent owners of Pointe Celeste who burned down the “old original home” of Joseph B. Wilkinson.

It’s possible that the plantation was in a rudimentary condition at the time Samuel K. Green began working on it as an overseer in 1822, but I think it may already have been an up-and-running venture by the time the Wilkinsons acquired it in 1819: note that the 1820 federal census shows them in Plaquemines Parish with 36 enslaved persons in their household.[11] Those enslaved persons would have been, most of them, working at Pointe Celeste to grow sugarcane and produce sugar, and they’d have been Samuel K. Green’s charge to oversee when the Wilkinsons hired him in or by 1822. By 1830, shortly after Samuel had worked for George Bradish in Plaquemines Parish, the Wilkinsons owned 103 enslaved persons in Plaquemines Parish.[12] By 1810 Bradish and his business partner William M. Johnson had 56 enslaved people on the plantation they owned just downriver from Pointe Celeste.[13] All of this is to say that the plantation culture of Plaquemines Parish, based on the labor of enslaved people, was well-established by the time the Wilkinsons bought Pointe Celeste, and in all likelihood, I think, they bought a working plantation and enslaved people to operate it.

The Wilkinson-Andrews Family Background

It also has to be noted that Joseph B. and Catherine Andrews Wilkinson arrived in Plaquemines Parish in 1819 with important family connections that allowed them to establish themselves as planters with relative ease. As a previous posting notes, Joseph was the son of General James Wilkinson (1757-1825), a Maryland native with affluent roots whose first wife Ann Biddle was from a prominent Philadelphia family.[14] James Wilkinson received Louisiana from France at the time of the Louisiana purchase, and was appointed the first governor of Louisiana Territory by Thomas Jefferson in the spring of 1805. Wilkinson County, Mississippi, the residence of Joseph and Catherine Wilkinson prior to their move to Louisiana, was named for James. He was a controversial figure who was accused of spying for Spain in collusion with Aaron Burr, but nonetheless a powerful man, and the fact that Joseph B. Wilkinson was James Wilkinson’s son would have counted for much as Joseph and Catherine began their life in Plaquemines Parish in 1819.

Catherine Andrews Wilkinson (1785-1861) came from a Williamsburg, Virginia, family with ties to the highly placed Randolph and Taylor families of Virginia.[15] Her father Robert Andrews (1748-1804) was an Anglican clergyman and Revolutionary War chaplain who graduated from the College of Philadelphia, a professor of moral theology at William and Mary College, and a member of the Virginia House of Delegates representing Williamsburg.[16] A petition filed on 9 February 1836 in Orleans Parish by Catherine’s brother-in-law George Taylor of Virginia states that in February 1833, he had hired out 133 enslaved people to Joseph B. Wilkinson, his son Robert Andrews Wilkinson, and his son-in-law Clement Biddle Penrose.[17] The petition notes that Catherine Andrews Wilkinson was a party to the contract, and alleges that the contracting parties had broken their contract with Taylor by selling their sugar crops when he had a claim on the crops, and by moving 60 or 70 of his enslaved persons from their Plaquemines Parish plantation to Jefferson Parish, where the Wilkinsons had a residence  and where a number of them died of cholera.

Samuel Kerr Green worked, then, as overseer on the Pointe Celeste plantation of Joseph B. and Catherine Wilkinson in Plaquemines Parish from 1822-5, as Catherine testified in the Green vs. Green case on 6 March 1857, or, as Joseph testified on the same day, from 1823-5.[18] According to David T. Gleeson, overseers on sugarcane and rice plantations in South Carolina and Louisiana tended to be paid higher wages than overseers on other types of plantations.[19] The work was intensive due to the large number of enslaved persons such plantations usually worked and to the demands of owners that those enslaved persons be worked relentlessly to produce as much sugarcane or rice as possible. The sugarcane plantations of south Louisiana and the Caribbean rightly had the reputation of being living hells on earth for enslaved people: their forced labor was incessant and demanding, disease was common, and the life spans of enslaved persons working on these plantations were often short. The reliance of Joseph B. Wilkinson on the forced labor of enslaved persons is starkly apparent in an ad for a runaway enslaved man named John Solet that Maunsel White & Co. placed on Wilkinson’s behalf on 6 April 1839 in the Times-Picayune, one of several such ads Maunsel White ran on behalf of Joseph Wilkinson at various times.[20]

George Bradish and William Martin Johnson’s Magnolia Plantation

In the Green vs. Green trial, both Joseph and Catherine Wilkinson testified that, after having worked as an overseer on their Plaquemines Parish plantation, Samuel then worked on the plantation of George Bradish, with Catherine noting that Bradish was also a sugarcane planter who lived near the Wilkinsons in Plaquemines Parish. She specified that Samuel K. Green worked for Bradish in 1829 and 1830. Both Wilkinsons stated that during his time working on Bradish’s plantation, Samuel once or twice brought to their house a woman he introduced as his wife and a small son about four years of age in Catherine’s reckoning; Joseph thought the boy was three or four years of age. The Greens called their son Ezekiel, the Wilkinsons testified. Joseph then added that subsequent to this time, he understood that Samuel was not married to Ezekiel’s mother, who, as we’ve seen, is named as Eliza Jane Smith in the 15 February 1859 Louisiana Supreme Court ruling upholding Pointe Coupee district court’s verdict in favor of Ezekiel in the lawsuit he filed against his father Samuel.[21] The Wilsons stated that Samuel K. Green and Ezekiel’s mother were known in their local community in Plaquemines Parish as husband and wife.

As the previous posting I’ve just linked also notes, in the petition he filed in Pointe Coupee Parish on 5 March 1856, Ezekiel stated that he was born in 1824 or 1825, and that his parents were living together in 1823.[22] This information presents something of a puzzle: if the information provided by the Wilkinsons in their testimony is correct, then Samuel K. Green had not married or begun living with Eliza Jane Smith prior to completing his employment with them in 1825. Yet Ezekiel was born in 1824 or 1825 and claimed that his parents began their marriage (or marital arrangement) in 1823 — and that would have been while Samuel was still employed with the Wilkinsons. But their testimony indicates that the Wilkinsons first met Eliza Jane only after Samuel had left their employment and was working for George Bradish. So it’s clear she did not live with Samuel at Pointe Celeste. The Wilkinsons appear to have been unacquainted with her until Samuel introduced her to them after he had begun working for Bradish, and this suggests to me that she was not a Plaquemines Parish resident.

The most plausible explanation I can think of to fit these pieces of information together is that Samuel met Eliza Jane in New Orleans and established a residence with her there while he was still working at Pointe Celeste in 1823. As another previous posting notes, the death certificate of Ezekiel’s daughter Rosa Frances Green (Holley, Anglin) states that her father Ezekiel Green was born in New Orleans.[23] At this point, I assume Samuel was living in quarters the Wilkinsons provided for their overseer at Pointe Celeste. Overseeing was normally a hands-on job that required on-site residence by an overseer. But given how near New Orleans was and how easy travel was by the river, I think it would have been possible for him to have had a simultaneous residence with Eliza Jane in New Orleans, and to have made frequent trips to be with her there while working for the Wilkinsons.

All this is conjecture, of course. I have no solid evidence to back up this hypothesis. But it does plausibly explain the various and slightly conflicting pieces of information about Samuel’s whereabouts in 1823-5 provided by the Wilkinsons’ testimony in Green vs. Green, and by Ezekiel’s complaint initiating that lawsuit. I am assuming with no real evidence to prove this that Samuel met Eliza Jane in New Orleans and that this is where she had been living prior to their marriage (or marital arrangement). As I’ve noted in previous postings, I have been unable to discover anything at all about her ancestry and background.

If, as Catherine Wilkinson stated in her testimony discussed previously, Samuel K. Green worked for George Bradish in 1829-1830 (Joseph Wilkinson stated that Samuel worked for Bradish subsequent to working for him, without providing dates for his time with Bradish), and if he left the Wilkinsons’ employ in 1825, then there was a gap of some four years before Samuel resumed his overseeing work in Plaquemines Parish. As I’ll discuss in a subsequent posting, there are some indicators that at some point in this span of time, he was in Arkansas Territory, though what he was doing there is unclear — and why he was not with Eliza Jane and his newborn son is equally unclear….

As Catherine Wilkinson also testified, Bradish was a neighbor to the Wilkinsons and a sugarcane planter in Plaquemines Parish. As I noted above, George Bradish and his business partner William Martin Johnson owned the Magnolia plantation just down the Mississippi River from the Wilkinsons’ Pointe Celeste plantation, and the 1810 federal census for Plaquemines Parish shows Bradish and Johnson with 56 enslaved persons at Magnolia.

George Bradish and William M. Johnson were both sea captains, Bradish originating in Salem, Massachusetts and Johnson in Nova Scotia.[24] In 1795, they acquired the land for the Magnolia plantation via a Spanish land grant. The plantation is 44 miles downriver from New Orleans at Pointe à la Hache. Soon after receiving their land grant, with the labor of enslaved persons, Bradish and Johnson built the plantation house photographed at some point prior to August 1963 by New Orleans photographer Howard “Cole” Coleman (see the head of the posting) .

In April 1882, Mark Twain visited the Magnolia plantation when it was owned by Louisiana’s ex-governor Henry Clay Warmouth. Twain wrote about this visit the following year in his book Life on the Mississippi, referring to Magnolia as “ex-Governor Warmouth’s sugar plantation” and noting that it had 2,600 acres, 650 of which were in sugarcane, and an orange grove of 5,000 trees.[25] Twain described the plantation’s sugar-making process in detail as follows:

The great sugar-house was a wilderness of tubs and tanks and vats and filters, pumps, pipes, and machinery. The process of making sugar is exceedingly interesting. First, you heave your cane into the centrifugals and grind out the juice; then run it through the evaporating pan to extract the fiber; then through the bone-filter to remove the alcohol; then through the clarifying tanks to discharge the molasses; then through the granulating pipe to condense it; then through the vacuum pan to extract the vacuum. It is now ready for market. I have jotted these particulars down from memory. The thing looks simple and easy. Do not deceive yourself. To make sugar is really one of the most difficult things in the world. And to make it right, is next to impossible. If you will examine your own supply every now and then for a term of years, and tabulate the result, you will find that not two men in twenty can make sugar without getting sand into it.

Twain’s account postdates the period in which Samuel K. Green was an overseer at Magnolia by five decades, of course, but even so, during the time Samuel worked for Bradish and Johnson, the plantation seems to have been an extensive operation with an imposing big house overlooking the operation, and with many enslaved people growing sugarcane and producing sugar through forced labor on the plantation. According to Carlyle Sitterson, some of the papers of the plantation dating as far back as 1798 are held by the Southern Historical Collection of Wilson Library at University of North Carolina Chapel Hill.[26] I think the collection to which Sitterson is pointing is the Henry Clay Warmouth Papers, 1798-1853, which apparently do include some documents from the Magnolia plantation.

As I’ve noted previously, Joseph B. and Catherine Wilkinson sold Pointe Celeste to William M. Johnson’s son Bradish Johnson, who had extensive landholdings in south Louisiana including the Whitney plantation in St. John the Baptist Parish, whose account books have survived and are in the plantation manuscript collection of the Louisiana State University library at Baton Rouge.[27] In addition to owning sugarcane plantations, Bradish Johnson also had sugar refineries in Louisiana and a distillery in New York City, along with extensive real estate in that city and in New Orleans. His Garden District mansion in New Orleans is now the Louise S. McGehee School. In buying real estate to supplement his income as a planter, Bradish Johnson was following in the footsteps of his father and his father’s business partner George Bradish, who owned numerous residences and other buildings in New Orleans’ French Quarter.[28]

In my next posting, I’ll take up Samuel K. Green’s story as he and Eliza Jane Smith parted ways just before 1830, and he then took his earnings from his overseeing work and bought himself plantation land in Natchitoches Parish in northwest Louisiana.

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[1] Ezekiel S. Green vs. Samuel K. Green, Pointe Coupee Parish, Louisiana, 9th District Court, file #1525.

[2] This information is in an obituary of Joseph and Catherine Wilkinson’s son Joseph Jr. published in the New Orleans Times-Picayune on 22 July 1902: “The Death of Dr. Wilkinson, at the Age of Eighty-Five, Removes About the Last Signer of the Louisiana Ordinance of Secession,” Times-Picayune (22 July 1902), p. 9. The obituary states that Joseph B. and Catherine Wilkinson moved to the Pointe Celeste plantation from Wilkinson County, Mississippi Territory, in 1819, having acquired it from Maunsel White.

[3] This is stated in ibid. On Elizabeth Céleste Denys de la Ronde, see her Find a Grave memorial page, Saint Louis cemetery #1, New Orleans, Orleans Parish, Louisiana, created by Diona Dickerson, with tombstone photos by Diona Dickerson and Kathy Hicks Thompson, transcribing her obituary in Courrier de la Louisiane, 2 September 1822.

[4] John La Tourette, Reference Map of the State of Louisiana (New Orleans, 1853), available digitally at the Library of Congress website.

[5] “The Subscribers,” National Banner and Nashville Whig (27 March 1822), p. 1, col. 3.

[6] Biographical information on Maunsel White is found at the page of University of North Carolina’s Wilson Special Collection Library for his papers held by the library, “The Maunsel White Papers, 1802-1912,” collection #02234; and see Find a Grave memorial page of Col. Maunsel White, Cypress Grove cemetery, New Orleans, Orleans Parish, Louisiana, created by D.S. Johnson, maintained by Mary Agnes Hammett, with tombstone photos by D.S. Johnson. See also Find a Grave memorial page of Joseph Biddle Wilkinson Sr., Greenwood cemetery, New Orleans, Orleans Parish, Louisiana, created by Graves, maintained by Mimi, with tombstone photos by Mike and Bushy Hartman. On Anita Shafer Goodstein’s history of early Nashville and her study of “young men on the make” who flocked to Nashville after 1812 to find their fortunes, see Nashville, 1780-1860: From Frontier to City (Gainesville: Univ. of Florida Press, 1989), p. 19.

[7] “Crushed and Loaf Sugar,” Times-Picayune (3 January 1847), p. 3, col. 1; “Refined and Loaf Sugars,” Daily Courier (Louisville) (28 May 1851), p. 2, col. 5.

[8] See Maunsel White’s 18 March 1826 letter to Andrew Jackson about cotton prices and Jackson’s crop that White was marketing, available digitally at the Library of Congress’ archives website; and see The Papers of Andrew Jackson, ed. Daniel Feller (Knoxville: Univ. of Tennessee Press, 2019), p. 25, n. 3, commenting on a letter Andrew Jackson wrote his son Andrew Jr. on 8 January 1833 telling his son that he had contacted Maunsel White in New Orleans about handling the Jacksons’ cotton crop.

[9] See Stanley Clisby Arthur and George Campbell Huchet de Kernion, Old Families of Louisiana (New Orleans: Harmanson, 1931), p. 392. Samuel K. Green had a cousin who was also a Naval officer and was stationed in New Orleans at some point in 1817: this cousin was James Edward Calhoun, son of John Ewing Colhoun and Floride Bonneau. Samuel’s parents John Green and Jane Kerr managed John E. Colhoun’s upcountry plantation Keowee Heights in Pendleton District, South Carolina, before moving to Alabama in 1818, and John Green’s brother Benjamin Green was the tutor of John E. Colhoun’s children. Jane Kerr’s mother Mary Calhoun Kerr was John E. Colhoun’s sister. It seems to me possible that Samuel K. Green know that his cousin James E. Calhoun was in New Orleans in 1817. On James Edward Calhoun’s Naval service in New Orleans, see Francis de Sales Dundas, The Calhoun Settlement, District of Abbeville (Staunton, Virginia, 1949) p. 11. The James Edward Calhoun Papers in the South Caroliniana library at the University of South Carolina have a Congressional order to report, dated 12 April 1817, from Daniel F. Patterson, informing James Edward Calhoun, midshipman in New Orleans, to repair on board the U.S. gunboat at anchor off Ft. St. John, Lake Pontchartrain, to U.S. frigate Congress and report to Captain Charles Morris. A logbook kept by James Edward Calhoun aboard the Congress, beginning 22 June 1817, is in the manuscript department of Perkins Library at Duke University (ms. #5302). It details the movements of the ship in the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean region in 1817-8.

[10] “General James Wilkinson: A Paper Prepared and Read by His Great-Grandson James Wilkinson,” Louisiana Historical Quarterly 1,2 (September 1917), p. 154.

[11] 1820 federal census, Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, p. 127.

[12] 1830 federal census, Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, p. 195. This census lists several large slaveholding planters, all of whom are enumerated next to each other, only by surnames: Montgomery, (Maunsel) White, (Joseph B. Wilkinson), and (William M.) Johnson. The Wilkinsons would sell Pointe Celeste to William M. Johnson’s son Bradish Johnson, who was named for Johnson’s business partner George Bradish.

[13] 1810 federal census, Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, p. 364.

[14] See “James Wilkinson” at Wikipedia.

[15] See Louis Alexander Burgess, ed., Virginia Soldiers of 1776, vol. 1 (Richmond: Richmond Press, 1927), pp. 55-7.

[16] See “Robert Andrews (clergyman)” at Wikipedia.

[17] Orleans Parish, Louisiana, district court petition #20883601. An abstract of the petition is available digitally in the race and slavery petitions of the website of the Digital Library on American Slavery.

[18] See supra, n. 1.

[19] David T. Gleeson, The Irish in the South 1815-1817 (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2001), p. 43, citing John Duffy, Sword of Pestilence: The New Orleans Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1853 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1966), p. 52.

[20] “100 Reward,” Times-Picayune (6 April 1839), p. 3, col. 2.

[21] E.S. Green v. S.K. Green, Louisiana Supreme Court #1521, ruling 15 February 1859. and A.N. Ogden, Louisiana Reports, Cases Argued and Determined in the Supreme Court of Louisiana, vol. 65: For the Year 1859 (New Orleans: West, 1860), p. 39.

[22] See supra, n. 1.

[23] Louisiana Department of Health, Louisiana Statewide Deaths, vol. 15, p. 6689.

[24] For information on Bradish and Johnson, I am indebted to Professor John Bradish of Princeton University, who sent extensive information to me in a 29 June 2000 email. According to Professor Bradish, at the time Bradish and Johnson bought the land on which Magnolia plantation was developed, both were active pilots with pilot rights on the lower Mississippi. George Bradish was captain of several coastal trading vessels that plied between Salem, Massachusetts, where he was born, Havana, and New Orleans. See also Gladys Stovall Armstrong, “Two Magnolia Plantations, Plaquemines Parish,” online at the Plaquemines Parish USGenweb site; and J. Carlyle Sitterson, “Magnolia Plantation, 1852-1862: A Decade of a Louisiana Sugar Estate,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 25 (1938-9), pp. 197-210.

[25] Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1883), pp. 475-9.

[26] Sitterson, “Magnolia Plantation.”

[27] See “Bradish Johnson” at Wikipedia.

[28] See the Collins C. Diboll Vieux Carré Digital Survey at the website of the Historical New Orleans Collection.