Deportation Cross

The cross is a replica of the one at Grand-Pré, Nova Scotia, where over 2,000 Acadian farmers, tradesmen and their families were put aboard ships in 1755. Here it stands inside the Acadian Memorial, which keeps the exiles' names. The Wall of Names carries about 3,000 Acadian refugees drawn from early Louisiana records, engraved on twelve bronze plaques set in granite frames. Robert Dafford's mural, The Arrival of the Acadians in Louisiana, measures 12 by 30 feet.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• African American Museum, St. Martinville — steps away
  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.
• St. Martin de Tours Catholic Church — steps away
  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.
• Longfellow-Evangeline State Historic Site — 1.0 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.
• Cypress Island Preserve at Lake Martin — 7.1 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.

More markers nearby

• The Eternal Flame — steps away
• Evangeline Oak — steps away
• Henry Wadsworth Longfellow — steps away
• The Old Castillo Hotel — steps away