Cajun Warrior

The bronze was a gift. Weldon Granger, an Erath native living in Houston, and his wife Liz paid the roughly $60,000 cost after his college roommate, John Arceneaux of Breaux Bridge, asked him for the name of a sculptor. Granger suggested the Texas artist Bill McGlaun. The nickname belongs to Breaux Bridge's detachment of the Army National Guard's 20th Special Forces Group, formed in 1959 under Lt. Col. Fred Patin, a Breaux Bridge native and decorated World War II veteran. More than 300 people attended the unveiling at Veterans Park.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Cypress Island Preserve at Lake Martin — 4.9 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.
• Vermilionville — 7.0 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.
• Longfellow-Evangeline State Historic Site — 11 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 — 11 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

• Scholastique Picou Breaux — steps away
• Most Rev. Jules B. Jeanmard, D.D. — steps away
• Breaux Bridge / Pont-Breaux — steps away
• Pont Breaux, Louisiane — steps away