French Settlement

French Settlement still carries its French name, La Côte-Française. The village began in 1800 along the Amite River with French, German and Italian immigrants, and it lived off cypress: sawmills, shingle-making, trapping, farming and a steamboat port. It was not incorporated until June 13, 1965, and the 2020 census counted 1,073 residents. Four houses on the National Register, the Decareaux, Deslattes, Guitreau and Lobell houses, and the Creole House Museum keep the old settlement visible.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Tickfaw State Park — 11 mi
  A floodplain park on the Tickfaw River, with cypress-tupelo swamp, bottomland hardwoods and about 4.75 miles of trails and boardwalks, plus a nature center with an 800-gallon river aquarium.
• Whitney Plantation — 20 mi
  A museum on a former sugar plantation along the River Road that tells its story through the people who were enslaved there, with memorials to 107,000 enslaved Louisianans and 2,200 children.
• LSU Rural Life Museum — 20 mi
  Four slave cabins moved from Welham Plantation and a working-plantation row of more than twenty saved buildings, on land the Burden family held as Windrush plantation since the 1830s.
• Old State Capitol — 25 mi
  James Dakin's 1850 Gothic castle on the river bluff, gutted in the Civil War, nearly demolished in 1991 and reopened in 1994 as a free museum of political history.

More markers nearby

• William Bartram Trail — 3.9 mi
• Galveztown — 6.2 mi
• Cal Ripken, Sr. — 8.4 mi
• The Civil War — 8.4 mi