Boat House

The man this boathouse was built for grew flowers for a living. Charles Willis Ward, born in Michigan, ran Cottage Gardens Nurseries in Queens and was a leading carnation grower. He helped found the American Carnation Society, led the American Peony Society for years, and wrote The American Carnation in 1903. Around 1900 he explored the Everglades for the Smithsonian. He also owned the magazine Recreation, merging it with Outdoor World. He spent his last years in California, running nursery interests in Eureka, and died there on June 24, 1920.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Jungle Gardens and Avery Island — 0.2 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.
• Shadows-on-the-Teche — 8.9 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.
• Cypremort Point State Park — 12 mi
  A 185-acre Vermilion Bay park reached by road, with a half-mile man-made beach, a marsh boardwalk, shore fishing and a boat launch, and a Chitimacha tradition of a great cypress here.
• St. Martin de Tours Catholic Church — 16 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

• This Buddah — steps away
• The Cleveland Oak — 0.2 mi
• Bird City — 0.3 mi
• McIlhenny — 0.3 mi