Ma Canfield's Cafe

The cafe is a museum now, kept for years by Boots Hinton, son of Dallas deputy Ted Hinton, one of the six officers at the ambush. Gibsland has other claims on a visitor. Three railroads once interchanged here, and railfans nicknamed the switching the Gibsland Shuffle. In 1887 O. L. Coleman founded Coleman College, described as the first secondary school for Black students in north Louisiana; it closed in 1937. Each mid-May the town stages a festival with a mock bank robbery, and it calls itself the Jonquil Capital of Louisiana.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Germantown Colony Museum — 15 mi
  Two hewn-log buildings from an 1836 religious commune near Minden, the earliest of its kind in Louisiana, with a museum added in 1975.
• Eddie G. Robinson Museum — 20 mi
  A state museum in a former women's gymnasium at Grambling State University, on the 408-win coach who sent more than 200 players to the pros.
• Lake Bistineau State Park — 21 mi
  A 903-acre state park on a lake the Great Raft made, opened in 1946 with a separate section for Black visitors from 1956, and now known for cypress water and a lake that is drawn down.

More markers nearby

• Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow Ambush Site — 7.5 mi
• Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker — 7.5 mi
• Claiborne Parish Confederate Monument — 11 mi
• St. John Colored School — 12 mi