Bendel Housekeeper's Home

Henri Willis Bendel was born in Vermilionville on January 22, 1868, to immigrant parents from Austria and Prussia, in a Jewish family. His mother married the businessman Benjamin Falk in 1878; the Falks ran a dry goods store and Falk's Opera House. After a millinery shop in Morgan City burned, Bendel and his wife Blanche moved to New York in 1899. He built a house for his sister Louise Bendel Meyer, later La Maison Française, which the university acquired in 1955. In 1927 he bought 180 acres on the Vermilion River, now Bendel Gardens.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Vermilionville — 1.1 mi
  A living-history village of about 23 acres on Bayou Vermilion in Lafayette, opened in 1990 to interpret the Native peoples, Acadians, Creoles and people of African descent of the Attakapas region.
• Cypress Island Preserve at Lake Martin — 6.9 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.
• Longfellow-Evangeline State Historic Site — 13 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.
• St. Martin de Tours Catholic Church — 13 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.

More markers nearby

• Pavy Studio — steps away
• Welcome to Freetown / Bienvenue à Freetown — steps away
• Butler's Drug Store / Pharmacie Butler — steps away
• Martin's Hat Shop — steps away