Downtown New Iberia Commercial Historic District

The district began with a pecan company. Jady Regard of Cane River Pecan Company bought an old Main Street building to move part of his operation downtown, but the tax credits he wanted required National Register status, so the city nominated the whole district instead. Planning director Jane Braud led the work, with architect and property owner Paul Allain volunteering on the application. The State Review Board approved it unanimously in June 2017, and the National Park Service listed it on December 13. Researchers had documented 123 buildings, 82 of them significant.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Shadows-on-the-Teche — steps away
  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.
• African American Museum, St. Martinville — 8.2 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.
• St. Martin de Tours Catholic Church — 8.2 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.
• Jungle Gardens and Avery Island — 8.7 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.

More markers nearby

• Allain's Jewelry Store / Bijouterie Allain / Joyería Allain's — steps away
• Entry Gate, Shadows-on-the-Teche — steps away
• George Rodrigue — steps away
• Shadows-on-the-Teche — steps away