Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The poem began as a dinner-table story. Nathaniel Hawthorne heard of two separated Acadian lovers from a clergyman, Horace Conolly, and passed it on to Longfellow, who took it up and spent months with Nova Scotian family histories. Evangeline appeared in November 1847 and sold nearly 36,000 copies by 1857. Longfellow built its Louisiana stretch from books and never saw the place. Scholars add that it shows the Acadians as passive and romanticizes their past, overlooking both their military resistance and New England's part in the expulsion.

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
• Evangeline Oak — steps away
• Deportation Cross — steps away
• The Eternal Flame — steps away