Entry Gate, Shadows-on-the-Teche

An 1835 inventory of David Weeks's plantations listed people as moveable property: 24 at the Shadows and more than 160 at Grand Côte, sugar fields on Weeks Island. By the Civil War the family owned nine plantations and enslaved 1,112 people. Amos and Patty, and Isaac and Louisa, were married couples among them; Charity was enslaved for more than four decades and later settled in Iberia Parish with her grandchildren. A 2024 exhibit lists about 700 names on a memorial wall. After emancipation the family restarted the farm with freed workers on contracts that kept them in debt.

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 — 8.3 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

• Shadows-on-the-Teche — steps away
• Downtown New Iberia Commercial Historic District — steps away
• Allain's Jewelry Store / Bijouterie Allain / Joyería Allain's — steps away
• Bayou Teche — steps away