Acadian Prairie Settlement

The Acadian Heritage and Culture Foundation, a nonprofit, established the Acadian Museum of Erath in 1990. Its exhibits cover Acadian and Cajun politicians and musicians, religion, folklore, military service, ranching, trapping and the skills of home and outdoor life. Vermilion Parish has the highest concentration of French speakers in Louisiana, with a culture that blends prairie and bayou traditions. The British deported the Acadians from Nova Scotia in 1755, and many later reached Louisiana, then a Spanish colony, after the 1763 Treaty of Paris.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Jungle Gardens and Avery Island — 9.1 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.
• Shadows-on-the-Teche — 14 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 — 17 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.
• African American Museum, St. Martinville — 17 mi
  A museum in the St. Martinville Cultural Heritage Center on the arrival of Africans in Southwest Louisiana, slavery, the free people of color and Reconstruction, with the fourteen-panel exhibit The Shackles of Memory.

More markers nearby

• The Erath Sugar Company — 1.0 mi
• Private Farrell J. Vice — 1.1 mi
• First Lt. Brandon R. Dronet — 1.1 mi
• The 1964 Fall of the Erath Water Tower — 1.1 mi