C.M. Washington High School

The school had a woman behind it long before the 1950 building. Cordelia Matthews Washington, born in Lafourche Parish in 1876, started a training school in 1902 in the back-of-town part of Thibodaux, the first Black educational institution in the three-parish area. Children came from Cut Off, Houma and Napoleonville, and one Larose-born alumna recalls a 70-mile round trip each day. The school board named it for her in 1942. After integration in 1968 the name gave way to South Thibodaux Elementary, and in 2019 the city council voted unanimously to restore it after alumni pressed.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Wetlands Acadian Cultural Center — 1.2 mi
  A Jean Lafitte National Historical Park center on Bayou Lafourche with Acadian and bayou-life exhibits, a 200-seat theater and ranger-guided boat tours to the E. D. White house.
• Laurel Valley Village — 1.8 mi
  A sugar plantation's workers' village south of Thibodaux, with cabins of about 1845, shotgun houses, a store and cemetery, and the 1887 strike and massacre in the parish around it.
• E. D. White Historic Site — 6.5 mi
  A National Historic Landmark house of about 1790 on Bayou Lafourche, built by enslaved people and home to two Whites, a governor and a Chief Justice, with an exhibit on the bayou's history.
• Southdown Plantation and Terrebonne Museum — 14 mi
  A Greek Revival sugar plantation house in Houma, worked by 233 enslaved people by 1852, with the last Terrebonne mill's story and a worker's cabin of about 1885.

More markers nearby

• Moses, Allen Chapel, Calvary Cemeteries — 0.4 mi
• St. Joseph Co-Cathedral — 0.9 mi
• Leonidas Polk — 1.0 mi
• Confluence Of Bayous — 1.2 mi