Our Neighbors
French Azilum As you follow Route 6 east of Towanda through the wooded hills of Bradford County, the road climbs a 1,600-foot ridge, offering far below views of one of the most idyllic spots in the Keystone State: the Susquehanna River meandering in a great horseshoe encircling a broad terrace of fields and pastures and farmhouses. It is called French Azilum (asylum), and if the sight gives you a sense of pastoral bliss, imagine how the Queen of France, Marie Antoinette, would have felt had she escaped the terrors of the French Revolution for the safety of Penn’s Woods. That was the plan. In the fall of 1793 a small group of French exiles came up the Susquehanna from Wilkes-Barre in dugout canoes and boats. They were citizens of France who “had fled to Philadelphia to escape the certain imprisonment and probable death for which their loyalty to Louis the XVI marked them,” according to a Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission leaflet. Others had fled the French colony of Santo Domingo. The two Frenchmen who established the colony were otherwise certainties for the executioner’s blade: an attorney, Antoine Omer Talon, and Louis de Noailles, Lafayette’s brother-in-law, who had fought with distinction in the American Revolution. Sensing a business opportunity, Philadelphians Robert Morris, who signed the Declaration of Independence and financed the American Revolution, wealthy businessman Stephen Girard, and others formed a land company and purchased sixteen hundred acres. Thirty log houses went up by the next spring, including La Grand Maison, which became the center of the social life of the sophisticated French town in the wilderness and was the house set aside for the queen. But Marie Antoinette was beheaded that same fall, October 16, 1793. Undeterred, the exiles in time added a schoolhouse, a chapel, a theater, dairying and sheep, gardens, a gristmill, blacksmith, and makers of soap, gunpowder, and glass. But with the bankruptcies of Morris and Nicholson, the émigrés left for Charleston, New Orleans, Santo Domingo, or, after 1803, returned safely to France under Napoleon. A few families, such as the LaPortes, remained; they and their descendants settled local communities. Today you can visit the historic site (www.frenchazilum.com; (570) 265-3376) at 469 Queens Road, Towanda, open May 28 to September 4, Monday through Friday; and September 5 to October 9 on weekends. The $5 for adults covers a self-guided tour of the grounds and a guided tour of the LaPorte House, a graceful structure of French colonial style built in 1836 by John LaPorte, son of an original settler. There’s a 1780s hand-hewn cabin, but none of the original structures remain, which is why it’s even worth a visit in winter, when all the buildings are closed, to stand in the snow-dusted fields, with nothing to consult but your imagination.
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