Indian Village

The Bienville visit is the famous part; the people had a longer story. The Acolapissa lived along the Pearl in seven villages, wore deer hides and antlers to stalk deer, farmed corn and squash, and were known for full-body tattoos, pricked in and rubbed with willow-bark ash. British-backed Chickasaw slave raids and disease had cut their numbers roughly in half by 1699, which is part of why they sought French protection. André Penicaut lived among them for months in 1706 and 1707, and his account is the fullest portrait of their village life.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fontainebleau State Park — 21 mi
  Lakeshore park on the Northshore where Tchefuncte potters, Acolapissa and Choctaw lived, and where 153 people were enslaved at Marigny's sugar and brick plantation by 1840; the mill ruin still stands.
• Chalmette Battlefield — 28 mi
  The ground of the January 8, 1815 Battle of New Orleans, beside Chalmette National Cemetery and the site of Fazendeville, a freedpeople's community founded in 1867 and bought out in the 1960s.
• The Cabildo — 31 mi
  The Spanish town hall on Jackson Square, finished in 1799, where Louisiana changed flags in 1803 and where the state Supreme Court sat in the same room until 1910, Plessy v. Ferguson among its cases.
• Congo Square — 31 mi
  The 2.35-acre corner of Louis Armstrong Park where, from 1817, New Orleans confined Sunday dancing by enslaved people to one place, and where crowds of hundreds gathered to drum, dance and trade.

More markers nearby

• Original Lone Star Republic — 3.4 mi
• History of Camp Salmen — 8.7 mi
• Abbé Adrien E. Rouquette — 15 mi
• Fontainebleau Plantation Sugar Mill — 22 mi