St. John the Baptist Parish (SJBP, French: Paroisse de Saint-Jean-Baptiste) is a parish located in the U.S. state of Louisiana. At the 2020 census, the population was 42,447. The parish seat is Edgard, an unincorporated area, and the largest city is LaPlace, which is also unincorporated.
St. John the Baptist Parish was established in 1807 as one of the original 19 parishes of the Territory of Orleans, which became the state of Louisiana.St. John the Baptist Parish is part of the New Orleans–Metairie metropolitan statistical area.
This was considered part of the German Coast in the 18th and 19th centuries, named for numerous German immigrants who settled along the Mississippi River here in the 1720s. On January 8, 1811, the largest slave insurrection in US history, known as the German Coast Uprising, started here. It was short-lived, but more than 200 slaves gathered from plantations along the river and marched through St. Charles Parish toward New Orleans. This is part of the Sugarland or sugar parishes, which were devoted to sugar cane cultivation. Planters used large numbers of enslaved African-American workers before the war, and numerous freedmen stayed in the area to work on these plantations afterward.
The parish includes three nationally significant examples of 19th-century plantation architecture: Evergreen Plantation, Whitney Plantation Historic District, and San Francisco Plantation House.
