New Acadia / Nouvelle Acadie

Loreauville has worn four names. It began as Fausse Pointe, became Dugasville when the Dugas family opened a trading post, and then Picouville after a Picou donated land for a chapel. On April 15, 1871, it was renamed for Ozaire Loreau, who gave the land for the old Catholic church and cemetery. Joseph Beausoleil Broussard and his brother Alexandre are among the Acadians said to have settled here in 1765. Several sugar mills worked along the bayou, and the Vida Shaw mill ran from the late 1930s to the early 1970s.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Shadows-on-the-Teche — 5.8 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 — 6.9 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 — 7.0 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.
• Longfellow-Evangeline State Historic Site — 7.4 mi
  A bayou-side state site on former Attakapas hunting ground, with a raised Creole cottage of about 1815, a reproduction 1800 farmstead and its slave quarters, and the story behind Longfellow's Evangeline.

More markers nearby

• Mt. Carmel Academy — 5.7 mi
• Becoming New Iberia — 5.8 mi
• Félicité — 5.8 mi
• Saint Peter's College — 5.8 mi