Louisiana Story

Standard Oil paid for the film and never appears in it: the company's name is neither seen nor heard, and Robert Flaherty kept ownership. Shooting ran fifteen months, after three months of scouting for the right place. Joseph Boudreaux, a local boy, plays the lead, and in an alligator scene the crew tied a rope around his waist to haul him back to shore. The film is shown as a documentary, though its events and characters are invented. Virgil Thomson's score, built on a field recording of Cajun musicians, won the 1949 Pulitzer Prize for Music.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Jungle Gardens and Avery Island — 14 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.
• Vermilionville — 19 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.
• Shadows-on-the-Teche — 19 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.
• St. Martin de Tours Catholic Church — 21 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

• Pére Antoine Desiré Mégret — steps away
• Abbeville — steps away
• Saint Mary Magdalen Church — steps away
• St. Mary Congregational Church — 0.2 mi