Architecture of Segregation

Black families in Natchitoches had members working for the railroad between 1910 and 1930, as tie-makers, section hands, firemen, porters and laborers, according to a National Park Service call for oral histories. Researchers interviewed people on 18 and 19 March 2024, asking about the depot's waiting room layout and how segregation worked there. The park calls the building one of a few surviving examples of a segregated public facility in Louisiana, so the memories of people who used its separate rooms are being gathered alongside the walls.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Natchitoches Historic District — 0.5 mi
  The riverfront blocks of the oldest permanent settlement in the Louisiana Purchase, founded in 1714 at a Natchitoches village, with a brick-paved Front Street, Cane River frontage and the largest bousillage construction in the South.
• Fort St. Jean Baptiste State Historic Site — 0.7 mi
  A reconstruction of the 1716 French fort beside the Natchitoches village, with a palisade of nearly 2,000 pine logs, a chapel and storeroom, and living-history programs, open Wednesday to Sunday.
• Cane River Creole National Historical Park — 8.6 mi
  Oakland and Magnolia, two Cane River cotton plantations kept as they stood, told through the enslaved families who worked them, the 1864 and 1804 freedom seekers and the tenant farmers who stayed into the 1960s.
• Los Adaes State Historic Site — 12 mi
  The Spanish presidio that was the capital of Texas from 1729 to 1770, some 15 miles from French Natchitoches, now an archaeological site where Native pottery is the most abundant find.

More markers nearby

• Natchitoches residents fought hard for civil rights — steps away
• The Texas and Pacific Railroad Depot — steps away
• Basilica of the Immaculate Conception — 0.4 mi
• First Mass in Natchitoches — 0.4 mi