Evangeline Monument

The statue's face belongs to a film. Edwin Carewe's silent Evangeline, starring Dolores del Río, premiered on August 24, 1929, drawing on Longfellow's poem and a 1913 Broadway play. It carried a synchronized score and sound effects, and the Library of Congress and UCLA hold prints. The statue given to St. Martinville was modeled on del Río, not on any Acadian woman. Locals long believed Evangeline herself lay buried beside it, and a local historian says a movement once sought to return her remains to Nova Scotia. Evangeline was Longfellow's invention.

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

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