Lieutenant Colonel Francisco Bouligny

Bouligny came to Louisiana in 1769 as aide to Alejandro O'Reilly, and because he spoke French he interpreted at the trial of the rebels who had driven out Spain's first governor. In 1775 and 1776, on leave in Spain, he wrote a report on the colony's people, trade and defenses that drew the court's notice. He fought at Manchac and Baton Rouge in 1779 and acted as governor in 1784. Spain named him brigadier general in 1800, but he died in New Orleans before the commission arrived, and lies in St. Louis Cathedral.

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 — 8.0 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
• Kathleen Babineaux Blanco — steps away
• The Steamboat Era — steps away
• William G. "Bunk" Johnson — steps away