Lafayette Museum / Le Musée de Lafayette

The house began as a one-room dwelling with a kitchen, built around 1800 by Jean Mouton, an early settler of the Attakapas country. It now has three contributing buildings: a two-story main house with attic and cupola, an Acadian house joined to it by a covered porch, and a brick smokehouse. His son Alexandre Mouton ran Île Copal, a 2,100-acre sugar plantation where 120 enslaved people worked, and as governor sold state-owned enslaved workers who had cleared the Red River Raft. Alexandre presided over Louisiana's 1861 secession convention.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Vermilionville — 1.5 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.
• Cypress Island Preserve at Lake Martin — 7.3 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.
• Longfellow-Evangeline State Historic Site — 13 mi
  A bayou-side state site on former Attakapas hunting ground, with a raised Creole cottage of about 1815, a reproduction 1800 farmstead and its slave quarters, and the story behind Longfellow's Evangeline.
• St. Martin de Tours Catholic Church — 13 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.

More markers nearby

• Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de La Fayette — steps away
• The Cathedral of Saint John the Evangelist — 0.2 mi
• General Alfred Mouton — 0.2 mi
• St. John Cathedral Oak — 0.2 mi