Howe Institute

Howe Institute grew from a Black congregation. St. Paul Congregational Church of New Iberia financed its opening around 1888, sources differ on the year, with help from the American Missionary Association and an endowment from Illinois philanthropist Peter Howe. The Union Sixth District Baptist Association later sponsored it. Jonas H. Henderson, once a professor at Leland University in New Orleans, was principal from 1896 to 1933. Thousands came to hear Booker T. Washington in 1915, and in 1927 the campus sheltered Black flood refugees. Schools for Black students later took names like Henderson's.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Shadows-on-the-Teche — 0.3 mi
  A National Trust site in New Iberia built 1831 to 1834 for sugar planters David and Mary Weeks, now interpreted around the 1,112 people the Weeks family enslaved, among them Charity Polk, Amos, Patty, Isaac and Louisa.
• African American Museum, St. Martinville — 8.2 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.
• St. Martin de Tours Catholic Church — 8.2 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.
• Jungle Gardens and Avery Island — 8.5 mi
  A 170-acre garden and wildfowl refuge on a Gulf Coast salt dome, founded by Edward Avery McIlhenny, on an island that was a Marsh sugar plantation worked by enslaved people before Tabasco and the 1862 salt works.

More markers nearby

• Kathleen Babineaux Blanco — 0.2 mi
• Louisiana's First Black Female Physician Dr. Emma Wakefield-Paillet — 0.2 mi
• The Steamboat Era — 0.2 mi
• William G. "Bunk" Johnson — 0.2 mi