Jacques Weil Company

By 1899 Jacques Weil and his brothers Edmond and Gontran were running a mercantile firm, Boudreaux, Leger and Weil, and Jacques became Rayne's leading frog dealer. He built a pen that held 15,000 frogs, made frog-leather goods and shipped to Chicago, Los Angeles and, reportedly, Paris. The frogs came from prairies and waterways, were packed in ice and went mainly to New Orleans, where cooks sautéed the legs in butter and garlic. Frogs were scarce elsewhere in Louisiana, and the trade eventually won Rayne its Frog Capital nickname.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Vermilionville — 16 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.
• Prairie Acadian Cultural Center — 20 mi
  A National Park Service center in Eunice on the Cajun prairie, with exhibits on the Acadians who settled the prairies, a Courir de Mardi Gras display, free music and cooking demonstrations, and the shuttered Liberty Theatre nearby.
• Cypress Island Preserve at Lake Martin — 22 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.
• Le Vieux Village and the Venus House — 24 mi
  A heritage park in Opelousas built around the Venus House of about 1791, the home of a free Creole woman of color, Marie Francois Venus, with an old schoolhouse, Methodist church and the visitor center's zydeco music exhibit.

More markers nearby

• Rayne Depot Square — steps away
• St. Joseph's Catholic Church & Cemetery — 0.2 mi
• Louisiana Frog Company — 0.4 mi
• Pouppeville — 0.7 mi