Person:John Mills (154)

John Mills of Bayou Sara

• Rowland E. Caldwell, Jr. “English Linage in Lafourche Interior” (article) Louisiana Historical Society.

This article is written from notes taken by my mother the late Katherine Tabor Caldwell.

John Mills was born in Virginia in 1758 removed to Pennsylvania and removed to Pointe Copee Parish in Louisiana. He married Parine Marioneux April 16,1781 in Pointe Coupee Parish. He founded the present village of Bayou Sarah in 1790. He first settled in the Natchez District near Second Creek, where he was in partnership with Isaac Johnson in a sawmill. After the mill was destroyed by a spring flood, Mills move to the Bayou Sarah region in 1738. He entered into partnership with Christopher Strong Steward and set up a trading post. In a short time the settlement at the mouth of bayou Sarah became the most important flatboat stop between Natchez and New Orleans. The village that sprang up around the trading post took the name of the bayou.

John and Parine had four daughters and one son. One of John and Parine's daughters Elizabeth married in 1814 to William Fields. Another daughter Parine Mills named for her mother married Hudson W. Tabor in 1816. Mr. fields came from Rhode Island and Mr. Tabor came form Claiborne County Mississippi. William and Hudson were in partnership together in St. Francisville. John Mills with his son-in-laws bought land in Lafourche Interior near Thibodaux in 1818. Some records indicate William Fields had Land in Lafourche in 1814. William and his wife move their residency to the Lafourche Interior in 1818 and Hudson and his wife moved in April of 1819. William was the first or one of the first people of English lineage to have land in the Lafourche Interior. There is no record that John Mills moved to Lafourche, but he visited his daughters from time to time.

Mr. Fields started buying, moving and selling land as he move south along Bayou Lafourche. He settled around Lockport. In 1820 he sold land about 3 miles south of Raceland to Dr. William W. Pugh. Dr. Pugh name the land Hope Plantation. William Fields and his wife Elizabeth had 11 children.

Hudson Tabor stayed in the Thibodaux area. His land was one mile south of town on the east bank of Bayou Lafourche. Hudson was a sugar planter farming his and his father-in-law's land. Hudson was justice of the peace, sheriff and post master for the Lafourche Interior. Hudson and his wife had six children. In 1826 Hudson wrote letter of resignation as postmaster and recommended his successors S. S. Dozer. in 1827 the Post Master General appointed S. S. Dozer post master of Thibodaux Thus Mr. Dozer became fist postmaster of Thibodaux.

In 1820 two of Hudson's brothers came to Lafourche from Mississippi. William U. Tabor with his wife Mary Tabor Tabor, and Isaac Tabor and his wife Susannah Bullock Tabor In 1823 Hudson's father and his third wife came to live in Lafourche. William U and his wife move to the Chackbay area and had 11 children. Isaac was a Methodist minister and he and his wife left Lafourche area in 1835. Isaac first removed to St. Landry parish then removed to Texas. He and his wife had 8 Children.

In Oct. of 1827 Hudson died leaving 6 minor children. Hudson father, William, died March 1844 at he age of ninety. His probate and an obituary gave is age and a veteran of the American Revaluation. By oral history William was in the third infantry or New York and joined January of 1775. William U. and his brother Isaac died in 1860. William Fields died in 1888.

By 1835 one and more people of English lineage meved into the Lafourche Interior. Most having come from the East through the Felixianas.

Source: English Linage in Lafourche Interior By Rowland Caldwell, Jr

• The men of “respectability and influence” mentioned in the Natchez dispatch.

They were indeed leaders of the region. Scotsman John Mills had founded the river port of Bayou Sara around 1790, built the fine brick townhouse called Propinquity and received a Spanish land grant to property upon which Rosedown Plantation developed. John Hunter Johnson was considered the founder of St. Francisville on the bluff overlooking Bayou Sara a few years later; his father Isaac Johnson, an Englishman from Liverpool, had partnered with Mills in a sawmill venture in the Natchez district before moving south to Feliciana. It was on Johnson’s Troy Plantation that much of the substantive planning for the West Florida Rebellion would take place. John H. Johnson was a lawyer and planter, later a state legislator, sheriff and judge; his son Isaac would be the 13th governor of Louisiana.

• Propinquity

One of St. Francisville's oldest brick buildings, Propinquity was built of some 200,000 bricks in 1809 as the store of John Mills with cellar underneath and dwelling house above. Lucy Audubon was carried on the account ledger during the years she taught plantation misses as a means of earning the money which allowed her husband to publish his Birds of America. The building was restored as a private residence in 1966. Located on Royal St.

1.   St. Francisville, Louisiana, in Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia.

   Below St. Francisville's bluffs, another early settlement called Bayou Sara had been established in the early 1790s and was at one time before the Civil War the largest shipping port on the Mississippi River between New Orleans and Memphis. Destroyed by repeated flooding and fires, nothing exists of Bayou Sara today, but a few of its structures were hauled up the hill into St. Francisville in the 1920s.[

2.   Bayou Sara, in Waymarking.com.