El Camino Real de los Tejas (Jefferson Street)

The road to Mexico City ended at a frontier where rules and daily life disagreed. Spain forbade trading guns or alcohol with the French, yet Spanish soldiers at Los Adaes had horses to sell, Natchitoches had cloth, and Native neighbors supplied food that helped feed the garrison. Accounts put the two forts twelve to fifteen miles apart. French trade goods turned up in the Los Adaes excavations, and French traders appear in its records as residents. After Spain took Louisiana in 1762, Los Adaes closed, but Natchitoches stayed a trade center.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fort St. Jean Baptiste State Historic Site — steps away
  A reconstruction of the 1716 French fort beside the Natchitoches village, with a palisade of nearly 2,000 pine logs, a chapel and storeroom, and living-history programs, open Wednesday to Sunday.
• Natchitoches Historic District — 0.3 mi
  The riverfront blocks of the oldest permanent settlement in the Louisiana Purchase, founded in 1714 at a Natchitoches village, with a brick-paved Front Street, Cane River frontage and the largest bousillage construction in the South.
• Cane River Creole National Historical Park — 8.0 mi
  Oakland and Magnolia, two Cane River cotton plantations kept as they stood, told through the enslaved families who worked them, the 1864 and 1804 freedom seekers and the tenant farmers who stayed into the 1960s.
• Los Adaes State Historic Site — 12 mi
  The Spanish presidio that was the capital of Texas from 1729 to 1770, some 15 miles from French Natchitoches, now an archaeological site where Native pottery is the most abundant find.

More markers nearby

• Dr. John Sibley — steps away
• The Jefferson Highway — steps away
• Judge Porter House — 0.2 mi
• Steel Magnolias — 0.2 mi