La Chapelle House

The marker says free people of color built this house, and St. Landry had one of the largest free Black populations in Louisiana outside New Orleans. Free women and men of color owned land and houses, ran businesses and sometimes enslaved others. After 1803 the state tightened its laws: acts of 1806 and 1808 ended the free Black militia and required official papers to label them free people of color. By the 1850s vigilance committees in the southwestern parishes were pressing many to leave, which makes a surviving house like this one rarer than it looks.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Le Vieux Village and the Venus House — steps away
  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.
• Prairie Acadian Cultural Center — 21 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.
• Vermilionville — 22 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.
• Atchafalaya Welcome Center — 25 mi
  A state welcome center inside the Atchafalaya Basin, the nation's largest river swamp, with exhibits on Basin history and life, a film, a crawfishing boat and French-speaking staff.

More markers nearby

• Louisiana Orphan Train Museum — steps away
• J.S. Clark High School — steps away
• Rodney Milburn — steps away
• Mary Jane Steam Engine Train — steps away