The history of West Feliciana Parish

A fugitive rebel leader builds Laurel Grove

Myrtles Plantation is a sprawling antebellum house, now run as a bed and breakfast and restaurant. It sits on a hill in West Feliciana Parish, Louisiana, its white veranda wrapping the front and south side of the building.

The house began with a man on the run. David Bradford (lawyer) was a lawyer from Pennsylvania who led the Whiskey Rebellion, an armed revolt against a federal tax on whiskey. When President George Washington sent troops to crush the uprising in 1794, Bradford fled south. Bradford reached Louisiana by way of Bayou Sara and secured a Spanish land grant of about 650 acres. In 1796, he built a six-bay house on it and called the place Laurel Grove. He lived there alone at first, while his wife Elizabeth and their five children stayed behind in Pennsylvania.

In 1799, President John Adams pardoned Bradford for his role in the rebellion. Only then did his family join him at Laurel Grove. Bradford died there in 1808, and Elizabeth kept running the plantation for years afterward.

Chloe's poisoning tale becomes the plantation's best-known legend

An older legend reaches back to Clark Woodruff's time at the plantation, decades before Winter's murder. The story goes that an enslaved woman named Chloe was caught eavesdropping on the family and punished by having her ear cut off. In revenge, she is said to have poisoned members of the Woodruff household with crushed oleander leaves, killing some of them.

It survives as the plantation's best-known legend rather than its history.

Yellow fever strikes before the house is renamed Myrtles

In 1817, Elizabeth handed the plantation to Clark Woodruff, a former law student of Bradford's who had married her daughter Matilda. Woodruff and Matilda had three children together. Matilda died not long after, and two of her children followed her, killed by yellow fever in 1823 and 1824.

When Elizabeth Bradford died in 1831, Woodruff left the plantation with his one surviving daughter and moved away. Woodruff sold the property in 1834 to Ruffin Gray Stirling, a wealthy planter. Stirling renamed it The Myrtles, after the crape myrtle trees growing on the grounds, and began rebuilding the house to nearly twice its original size. That expansion gave the house its famous veranda and its double front doors, trimmed in hand-painted stained glass cut in the shape of a French cross.

A lawyer is shot dead on the front porch

Ruffin Gray Stirling died in 1854, leaving the plantation to his wife and later his son, Steven Cobb Stirling. The Myrtles survived the Civil War standing, though it lost its fine furniture and silver to looting.

A story told about the war years claims three Union soldiers broke into the house to rob it, and were killed inside, leaving bloodstains on the floor that never came out. It did not.

The one killing at the Myrtles that is well documented happened on the front porch itself. William Drew Winter, a lawyer who helped manage the plantation and had married into the Stirling family, was shot there on January 26, 1871, and died of his wounds. A man named E. S.

Ghost stories turn the plantation into a television subject

Ownership passed out of the Stirling family in 1894 and changed hands several more times over the following decades. In the early 1900s, the land around the house was divided among descendants of a later owner, Harrison Milton Williams.

Ghost stories at the Myrtles were written down as early as 1941, when the Federal Writer's Project recorded local accounts of the house. In 1948, photographer Clarence Laughlin included the plantation in his book "Ghosts Along the Mississippi." In the 1950s, owner Marjorie Munson said she saw a phantom figure wearing a green turban, one of the earliest personal accounts tied to the house's reputation as haunted.

James and Frances Kermeen Myers bought the Myrtles in the 1980s and opened it as a bed and breakfast, a use it still has. In 1978, the house was added to the National Register of Historic Places. Unsolved Mysteries filmed a segment on the hauntings in 2001, and Ghost Hunters followed with an episode in 2005.

Guests now sleep in the rooms behind the legends

The Myrtles now operates as a bed and breakfast and restaurant, with eleven rooms for guests across the main house and nearby cottages. The General's Store behind the main house, the oldest building on the property, was where Bradford lived while the house itself was being built. It now holds the gift shop and plantation offices.

Guided tours cover both the architecture and the ghost stories, and overnight guests can stay in the rooms where the legends are set.