Dedicated to the Memory of Joseph Jefferson

Jefferson adapted Washington Irving's tale for the stage in 1859, took Rip Van Winkle to London in 1865 for about 170 nights and played the part for some forty years, creating almost no other major role. In 1869 he bought Orange Island, a peninsula on Lake Peigneur, which came to be called Jefferson Island, and had a Victorian house built there by about 1870. The house is on the National Register, and the gardens' 550-year-old oak is the one Grover Cleveland is said to have slept under.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Jungle Gardens and Avery Island — 5.9 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 — 9.7 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.
• 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.
• African American Museum, St. Martinville — 13 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.

More markers nearby

• Lake Peigneur — steps away
• Bayou Petite Anse — 5.7 mi
• The Cleveland Oak — 5.8 mi
• Avery Island Salt Dome — 5.9 mi