Historic Donaldsonville

Before it was Donaldsonville, the French called this place Lafourche-des-Chitimachas, after the Chitimacha people and the bayou. Acadians expelled from Acadia in 1755 began settling the area between 1756 and 1785, working small subsistence farms. In 1806 the landowner and planter William Donaldson hired the New Orleans architect Barthelemy Lafon to lay out a town, and the place took Donaldson's name. The street grid has changed little since, so the blocks you walk follow a plan drawn barely twenty years after the last of those first Acadian farms were settled.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• E. D. White Historic Site — 20 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.
• Whitney Plantation — 21 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 — 22 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.
• Wetlands Acadian Cultural Center — 24 mi
  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.

More markers nearby

• Bayou Lafourche — steps away
• Fort Butler — steps away
• Fort Butler UDC Monument — 0.2 mi
• Fort Butler African American Soldiers Memorial — 0.2 mi