New York furniture for the Stirlings of Wakefield, Saint Francisville, Louisiana.

On October 24, 1836, twenty-eight crates of furniture, commissioned from the eminent New York City cabinetmaker Duncan Phyfe by the Louisiana planter Lewis Stirling (Fig. 1, left) and his wife, Sarah Turnbull Stirling (Fig. 1, right), arrived in New Orleans on board the ship Creole. (1) This delivery marked the culmination of a five-month trip taken by the Stirlings to the East Coast and Canada for the purposes of acquiring furnishings for their new house, enrolling their son at Yale University, and taking a grand tour of the famous sites of upstate New York. The Stirlings' purchase is one of three major documented sales of Phyfe's work in the late Grecian style and is a unique instance of the famed cabinetmaker producing wares for a client living in the Deep South.

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The furniture, purchased at the "extravagant" price of $1,900, (2) was destined for the Stirlings' newly completed Greek revival house, Wakefield, located a few miles north of Saint Francisville, Louisiana. In the heart of the Feliciana region, Saint Francisville is situated in an area known for its lush landscape and rich soil. Originally claimed by the French, Feliciana was ceded to the British in 1763 following the French and Indian War. Spain governed the area from 1779 to 1810, when residents of Feliciana successfully rebelled against the Spanish and briefly established the Republic of West Florida prior to annexation by the United States.

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Despite the thirty-one years of Spanish rule, Feliciana remained the domain of English and Scottish settlers, populated first by Tories escaping from Revolutionary America and then by Anglo-Americans migrating westward, encouraged by attractive land grants and the richness of the soil. The introduction of the cotton gin and steamboat accelerated the influx of settlers. Saint Francisville, with its Mississippi River port of Bayou Sara, emerged as the region's principal town. By 1850 Bayou Sara was the largest port on the Mississippi between Memphis and New Orleans and the departure point for the enormous crops of cotton harvested on Feliciana's plantations (see Fig. 2). (3)