Marcus Pennington Zills

Marcus Zills's legacy came with a price tag. The church's bell was presented on May 8, 1855, at a cost of $500, about a year and a half after Zills died of consumption in December 1853. The following year the church spent nearly $5,000 to enclose its portico as a vestibule with a choir gallery, and in June it built its first rectory. The bell now hangs in a cupola that may not have existed before it arrived. Zills had been Thibodaux's postmaster in the mid-1840s before he became a merchant.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Wetlands Acadian Cultural Center — steps away
  A Jean Lafitte National Historical Park center on Bayou Lafourche with Acadian and bayou-life exhibits, a 200-seat theater and ranger-guided boat tours to the E. D. White house.
• Laurel Valley Village — 2.2 mi
  A sugar plantation's workers' village south of Thibodaux, with cabins of about 1845, shotgun houses, a store and cemetery, and the 1887 strike and massacre in the parish around it.
• E. D. White Historic Site — 5.7 mi
  A National Historic Landmark house of about 1790 on Bayou Lafourche, built by enslaved people and home to two Whites, a governor and a Chief Justice, with an exhibit on the bayou's history.
• Southdown Plantation and Terrebonne Museum — 15 mi
  A Greek Revival sugar plantation house in Houma, worked by 233 enslaved people by 1852, with the last Terrebonne mill's story and a worker's cabin of about 1885.

More markers nearby

• Whitmell Pugh Martin — steps away
• Felix Grundy Winder — steps away
• St. John's Historic Cemetery — steps away
• John Carlton Beatty — steps away