Bayou Teche

Magnolia Park sits on the bayou about a mile east of downtown, and the boat launch here is a terminus on the Bayou Teche Paddle Trail. The water has carried more than freight. Showboats worked the Teche, sometimes as far as St. Martinville, bringing plays and music to bayou towns long after much of the cargo had gone to rail. Today the traffic is mostly canoes and kayaks, but anyone with a paddle can put in on the same water that once carried those floating stages.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Longfellow-Evangeline State Historic Site — 0.3 mi
  A bayou-side state site on former Attakapas hunting ground, with a raised Creole cottage of about 1815, a reproduction 1800 farmstead and its slave quarters, and the story behind Longfellow's Evangeline.
• African American Museum, St. Martinville — 1.2 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.
• St. Martin de Tours Catholic Church — 1.3 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.
• Cypress Island Preserve at Lake Martin — 6.6 mi
  Nearly 10,000 acres of bottomland hardwood and cypress-tupelo swamp at the south end of Lake Martin, owned by The Nature Conservancy, with a boardwalk and a rookery of egrets, spoonbills and alligators.

More markers nearby

• Attakapa Indian — 1.2 mi
• The Eternal Flame — 1.2 mi
• Deportation Cross — 1.2 mi
• On This Site Lie Buried Officers of The Attakapas Militia — 1.2 mi