Grand Coteau

The settlement was first called St. Charles Town, after the Jesuits built St. Charles College in 1837, and only later became Grand Coteau, French for great hill. Its people came from many origins: African Americans, free people of color, Acadians, Creoles, French, Irish and Germans. Black students attended the Sacred Heart Colored School and later St. Peter Claver High School. The Grand Coteau Historic District joined the National Register in 1980, the same year this marker went up, and the town still shows its Victorian building boom.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Le Vieux Village and the Venus House — 8.0 mi
  A heritage park in Opelousas built around the Venus House of about 1791, the home of a free Creole woman of color, Marie Francois Venus, with an old schoolhouse, Methodist church and the visitor center's zydeco music exhibit.
• Vermilionville — 14 mi
  A living-history village of about 23 acres on Bayou Vermilion in Lafayette, opened in 1990 to interpret the Native peoples, Acadians, Creoles and people of African descent of the Attakapas region.
• Cypress Island Preserve at Lake Martin — 17 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.
• Atchafalaya Welcome Center — 20 mi
  A state welcome center inside the Atchafalaya Basin, the nation's largest river swamp, with exhibits on Basin history and life, a film, a crawfishing boat and French-speaking staff.

More markers nearby

• Academy of the Sacred Heart — 1.2 mi
• Assumption School — 6.3 mi
• The Lynching of Louis Senegal and Antoine Domingue — 6.6 mi
• Site of Bowie Residence — 7.0 mi