Becoming New Iberia

Iberia Parish was created in 1868 and New Iberia became its seat, though the first courthouse was only rented space. By 1884 a courthouse stood on the ground now called Bouligny Plaza, and it served until the present building opened on Iberia Street in 1940. The town had been laid out in 1835 and incorporated in 1839. The census counted 306 residents in 1850 and 6,815 in 1900, the years in which a Teche landing became a county town.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Shadows-on-the-Teche — steps away
  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.
• African American Museum, St. Martinville — 8.3 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 — 8.4 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.
• Jungle Gardens and Avery Island — 8.7 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.

More markers nearby

• Félicité — steps away
• New Iberia / La Nouvelle-Ibérie — steps away
• Saint Peter's College — steps away
• Shadows-on-the-Teche — steps away