Kathleen Babineaux Blanco

Blanco grew up in Coteau, outside New Iberia, and attended Mount Carmel Academy before earning a degree at what became the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. She was the first woman from Lafayette in the Louisiana House, the first woman elected to the Public Service Commission and its first woman chair. She won the 2003 governor's race over Bobby Jindal, 52 to 48 percent. After Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005 she accepted responsibility for state-level failures, and in 2007 she announced she would not run again. She died in 2019.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Shadows-on-the-Teche — 0.2 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 — 8.1 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 — 8.1 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.
• Jungle Gardens and Avery Island — 8.7 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

• Louisiana's First Black Female Physician Dr. Emma Wakefield-Paillet — steps away
• The Steamboat Era — steps away
• Lieutenant Colonel Francisco Bouligny — steps away
• William G. "Bunk" Johnson — steps away