Abbeville

Two stories explain the name. Most accounts say Father Mégret named his new village for his hometown, Abbeville in France. A less common reading joins abbé, the French word for a priest, to ville, so that the name means the priest's town. He laid the village out on a French provincial plan, and his 1846 map showed roughly 38 to 40 acres, with the name spelled Abbville. Most early settlers descended from Acadians who had reached the prairies between 1766 and 1775. The town was incorporated in 1850 and is the seat of Vermilion Parish.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Jungle Gardens and Avery Island — 14 mi
  A 170-acre garden and wildfowl refuge on a Gulf Coast salt dome, founded by Edward Avery McIlhenny, on an island that was a Marsh sugar plantation worked by enslaved people before Tabasco and the 1862 salt works.
• Vermilionville — 19 mi
  A living-history village of about 23 acres on Bayou Vermilion in Lafayette, opened in 1990 to interpret the Native peoples, Acadians, Creoles and people of African descent of the Attakapas region.
• Shadows-on-the-Teche — 19 mi
  A National Trust site in New Iberia built 1831 to 1834 for sugar planters David and Mary Weeks, now interpreted around the 1,112 people the Weeks family enslaved, among them Charity Polk, Amos, Patty, Isaac and Louisa.
• St. Martin de Tours Catholic Church — 21 mi
  The Mother Church of the Acadians, founded in 1765 on St. Martin Square in St. Martinville, with a late 1870s Lourdes grotto and, a block away, the Evangeline Oak on Bayou Teche.

More markers nearby

• Louisiana Story — steps away
• Pére Antoine Desiré Mégret — steps away
• Saint Mary Magdalen Church — steps away
• St. Mary Congregational Church — 0.2 mi