Born in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 1806, Leonidas Polk attended the University of North Carolina before receiving an appointment to West Point, where he graduated in 1827. He soon resigned his commission, became an Episcopal priest, and in 1832 moved to a farm near Columbia, Tennessee. He combined farming with pastoral work with a colored congregation until 1838, when he was appointed missionary Bishop of the old southwest, the vast area comprising present-day Arkansas, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Indian Territory. In that role, Polk moved his family to Bayou Lafourche and lived on Leighton Place Plantation a few miles upstream from Thibodaux. Among his first accomplishments there was founding St. John's Episcopal Church, built in 1843-1844 in the style of a Greek temple on Ridgefield Plantation land donated by his friend George S. Guion. Polk and his wife, Frances Devereaux, schooled their slaves, provided religious services for them, and established a lay nursery for servants' children. A cholera epidemic in 1849 killed many plantation workers, and a tornado in 1850 destroyed the sugar mill, many other structures, and the sugar cane crop. After the plantation failed, Polk moved in 1854 to New Orleans, where he became rector of Trinity Church on Jackson Avenue, and he later helped establish the University of the South at Sewanee, Tennessee. In 1861 he returned to military service, rose to Lieutenant General in the Confederate army, and was killed by a cannonball at the Battle of Pine Mountain, Georgia, on June 14, 1864; his remains were later interred in Christ Church Cathedral, New Orleans.