Duchamp Opera House

St. Martinville was nicknamed Le Petit Paris, and the name came from habits as much as buildings: a French theater, good hotels, and New Orleanians who settled here to escape epidemics. The opera house, built around 1830, is the stage that nickname rests on. Its second floor is now a live theater and home to the Evangeline Players, and the street level houses the town's official gift shop and a regional art gallery. It is listed among the town's chief landmarks.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• 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.
• 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.
• 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 — 7.0 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

• St. Martinville — steps away
• Ange Marie Jan — steps away
• St. Martin Catholic Church — steps away
• On This Site Lie Buried Officers of The Attakapas Militia — steps away