Beau Pre-Circa 1828

John W. Jeanerette, the man whose name the town carries, came from South Carolina in the 1820s and made his living first as a tutor and then as a storekeeper and saloon keeper. Around 1830 he bought a plantation that went by the names Pine Grove and Beau Pré. The post office and then the town took his name. The house is gone, and the ground has become a cemetery. In 1871 an Alsatian immigrant, Lazard Wormser, opened a general store in the town, and it later grew branches in New Iberia and Franklin.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Shadows-on-the-Teche — 7.3 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.
• Chitimacha Museum — 12 mi
  The Chitimacha Tribe of Louisiana's own museum at Charenton: the tribe's account of its territory, the French wars and enslavement, the land held in trust, and river cane baskets.
• Jungle Gardens and Avery Island — 12 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.
• African American Museum, St. Martinville — 14 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

• Nicholas Provôt — 4.1 mi
• Félicité — 7.1 mi
• Becoming New Iberia — 7.1 mi
• New Iberia / La Nouvelle-Ibérie — 7.1 mi