First Mass in Natchitoches

Antonio Margil was born at Valencia in 1657 and reached Veracruz in 1683. He joined Domingo Ramón's 1716 expedition to East Texas, and in March 1717 he founded San Miguel de Linares among the Adai, probably the first church in Louisiana. He also walked to Natchitoches to minister to French Catholics. After the French raid of 1718 he returned in 1721 and dedicated the rebuilt church to Our Lady of the Pillar. He died in Mexico City on 6 August 1726, and Pope Gregory XVI declared his virtues heroic in 1836, making him Venerable.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Natchitoches Historic District — 0.5 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.
• Fort St. Jean Baptiste State Historic Site — 0.6 mi
  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.
• Cane River Creole National Historical Park — 8.4 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

• Basilica of the Immaculate Conception — steps away
• The Red River Campaign — steps away
• Site of Fort Claiborne — steps away
• Prudhomme-Rouquier House — steps away