Evangeline Oak

Longfellow's poem never mentions a Louisiana oak, and Longfellow never visited Louisiana. The tree's legend comes from Judge Felix Voorhies's 1907 Acadian Reminiscences, which told of Emmeline Labiche and Louis Arceneaux, who meet under the oak only for Louis to say he has married someone else. A local historian calls Voorhies's book inaccurate, and another historian suggests it may be a composite of family stories. Census records show no trace of Longfellow's surnames. A local academic calls it a legend: a tale told as true. People marry under the oak anyway, and visitors keep coming.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• 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.
• 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.
• 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 — 7.1 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

• The Old Castillo Hotel — steps away
• Henry Wadsworth Longfellow — steps away
• Deportation Cross — steps away
• The Eternal Flame — steps away