25 acres of historic antebellum gardens survive where a 40-room Gothic Revival mansion burned to the ground in 1963, with a family cemetery and a reported phantom horseman still at large.
9247 US Highway 61, St. Francisville, LA 70775
Research updated June 2026
Age
All Ages
Cost
$$
Admission fee required; see website for current rates.
Access
Limited Access
Garden paths with uneven ground and grass; some areas may not be accessible.
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1849 · 40-room Gothic Revival plantation mansion constructed 1849 for David Barrow, wealthiest planter in West Feliciana Parish · Family cemetery with Congressional memorial obelisk to U.S. Senator Alexander Barrow · Mansion destroyed by fire March 7, 1963; 25-acre historic gardens survive and are open to the public · Listed on the National Register of Historic Places
David Barrow selected the hilltop site along Bayou Sara Road in the 1840s and hired architect George Purves to execute a design of unusual ambition for the region. The resulting 40-room mansion blended Gothic Revival detailing — pointed arches, ornamental bargeboards, cast-iron tracery — with the raised Creole plantation form common to West Feliciana Parish. Construction was completed in 1849, the same year the grounds received their formal French-inspired garden plan: terraced parterres, long allees of live oak, a geometrically divided flower garden, and woodland walks leading down to a creek.
Senator Alexander Barrow, who represented Louisiana in the U.S. Senate until his death in 1846, is interred in the family cemetery on the grounds. A Congressional memorial obelisk marks his grave — a relatively rare honor that speaks to his political standing. The estate passed through several generations of the Barrow family before falling into decline in the early twentieth century.
On March 7, 1963, fire swept through the mansion and destroyed it entirely. No major structural elements survived. The formal gardens, however — maintained by subsequent owners including the Trimble family, who undertook a significant restoration — remained substantially intact. Today the property is open seasonally, primarily during the spring azalea bloom and fall foliage periods, and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
The site is frequently included on West Feliciana Parish's heritage tourism circuit alongside the nearby Rosedown Plantation State Historic Site and the town of St. Francisville itself, one of the oldest towns in Louisiana.
Sources
The lore attached to Afton Villa Gardens centers on a single recurring motif: a horseman glimpsed in the area of the former mansion, riding hard along a route that corresponds to no current path. The figure appears on no fixed schedule and has been described in travel accounts about St. Francisville's haunted reputation, most recently in a 2023 roundup of West Feliciana Parish supernatural sites.
No documentary record ties the phantom to a specific individual. The most plausible candidate by association would be a member of the Barrow family — the estate's founders — but nothing in the historical record supports that attribution. The mansion's violent end by fire in 1963 left no human casualty on record, and the cemetery burials are from natural-cause deaths spanning the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The phantom horseman tale fits a pattern common to former plantation sites in the Deep South where the main house is gone but the grounds remain: the lore fills the absence of the structure, anchoring the site to its past. Local ghost tour operators include Afton Villa on driving circuits of the St. Francisville area, treating it as an atmospheric stop rather than a documented investigation site.
Notable Entities
Wander 25 acres of formal antebellum gardens laid out in the 1840s, pausing at the family cemetery with its Congressional memorial obelisk to Senator Alexander Barrow. The mansion's footprint is gone — burned March 7, 1963 — but the tree-lined allees and parterre beds remain.
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