Mt. Carmel Academy

After 1872 the school kept going for more than a century, and its end was felt across the town. The Sisters of Mount Carmel closed the girls' school in 1987 and 1988, and about 250 students joined Catholic High, which leased the building while its own campus grew. A local tribute that cites no sources counts more than a thousand girls taught there, says a local family bought the building, and recalls a window pane scratched with an engagement ring. The future governor Kathleen Blanco was a student.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Shadows-on-the-Teche — steps away
  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 — 8.1 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 — 8.8 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

• New Iberia Shipwreck — steps away
• Bayou Teche — steps away
• James Lee Burke — steps away
• William G. "Bunk" Johnson — steps away