Historic Downtown Broussard

Before it was Broussard, the ridge was called Côte Gelée, or Frozen Hills, a name the city's own history ties to the hilly ground and the severe winter of 1784. The town took Valsin Broussard's name in 1884. Its National Register main street district, listed on March 14, 1983, holds five buildings dated between 1902 and 1911, four of them built by men named Billeaud, Bernard and Comeaux. The city says Broussard grew from a horse-and-buggy settlement among sugarcane plantation homes into a place with more than 300 businesses.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Vermilionville — 4.5 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 — 5.9 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.
• St. Martin de Tours Catholic Church — 9.1 mi
  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.
• African American Museum, St. Martinville — 9.2 mi
  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.

More markers nearby

• Valsin Broussard — steps away
• City of Broussard — 0.2 mi
• Valsin House — 0.6 mi
• St. Cecilia School — 0.7 mi