George Seth Guion

Thibodaux's lots owe something to a land gift and a brick schoolhouse. Caroline Winder Guion received the 1,200-acre Ridgefield plantation from her stepfather soon after her 1831 marriage, and George Guion later subdivided its Jackson Street frontage, which supported the town's shops, churches and schools. In April 1847 he gave a corner at Jackson and Clinton Streets, now Tenth, for a school. The two-story brick Guion Academy cost $3,000 and enrolled about 150 pupils, boys and girls taught separately. He died at Ridgefield in 1861.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Wetlands Acadian Cultural Center — steps away
  A Jean Lafitte National Historical Park center on Bayou Lafourche with Acadian and bayou-life exhibits, a 200-seat theater and ranger-guided boat tours to the E. D. White house.
• Laurel Valley Village — 2.3 mi
  A sugar plantation's workers' village south of Thibodaux, with cabins of about 1845, shotgun houses, a store and cemetery, and the 1887 strike and massacre in the parish around it.
• E. D. White Historic Site — 5.6 mi
  A National Historic Landmark house of about 1790 on Bayou Lafourche, built by enslaved people and home to two Whites, a governor and a Chief Justice, with an exhibit on the bayou's history.
• Southdown Plantation and Terrebonne Museum — 15 mi
  A Greek Revival sugar plantation house in Houma, worked by 233 enslaved people by 1852, with the last Terrebonne mill's story and a worker's cabin of about 1885.

More markers nearby

• Silas T. Grisamore — steps away
• Richard Henry Allen — steps away
• John Carlton Beatty — steps away
• Whitmell Pugh Martin — steps away