Afton Villa Gardens Awarded a U.S. Department of the Interior National Park Service Historic Preservation Fund Grant to Continue the Conservation and Preservation of a 19th Century Garden
ST. FRANCISVILLE, LA, January 18, 2025 – Afton Villa Gardens is pleased to announce that it is a recipient of a Historic Preservation Fund Award to conduct a Historic America Landscape Survey (HALS) to continue the conservation and preservation of this important 19th century Louisiana garden.
Afton Villa Gardens, located in St. Francisville, Louisiana, is a historic garden dating from the mid-19th century. Afton Villa, the estate that fell victim to a devastating fire in 1963, left only the gardens intact. The garden features that remain are open to the public and are listed on the National Register of Historic Places by the United States Department of the Interior. As recently as December 2023, Afton Villa Gardens was ranked the second most beautiful garden in Louisiana.
Each year the LA State Historic Preservation Office distributes an allocation of federal funds for projects through a competitive grant process from the U.S. Department of the Interior’s National Park Service (NPS). Afton Villa Gardens was awarded $58,935 for this project to document the site. The principal investigator for the HALS project will be Dr.Lake Douglas, FASLA, professor emeritus, LSU Robert Reich School of Landscape Architecture. Douglas has published widely in the area of landscape history of the Gulf South, including Public Spaces Private Gardens A History of Designed Landscape in New Orleans and Steward of the Land. He edits a series for LSU Press that has published Genevieve Munson Trimble’s Afton Villa The Birth and Rebirth of a Nineteenth-Century Louisiana Garden and Charting the Plantation Landscape from Natchez to New Orleans.
HALS is a federal program within the National Park Service charged with creating a permanent, publicly accessible record of significant cultural and designed landscapes in the United States and its territories. Through this program measured and interpretive drawings, written histories, and images provide a lasting record of landscapes that reflect the types, periods, and patterns of American cultural landscapes useful for scholarly research, interpretation, and education.
The twelve-month project, under the direction of Dr. Douglas and Duplantis Design Group of Baton Rouge, will include research and digitization of historic documents related to the Afton Villa property, measured drawings of site features, and a historical report of the property’s evolution from its 19th century beginning to the present day. When completed, the report will be housed in the Library of Congress.
Contact: Fred Corle-703-508-9073 – [email protected]