New Iberia / La Nouvelle-Ibérie

The town has worn several names. Colonists called it Nueva Iberia, French speakers said Nouvelle Ibérie, and English speakers after the 1803 purchase called it New Town. Postmarks from 1802 read Nova Iberia, and the post office settled on New Iberia in 1814. The place was laid out in 1835 and incorporated in 1839 as the Town of Iberia, and a charter amendment in 1847 made New Iberia the official name. Spanish Lake, also called Lake Tasse, is where the 1779 colonists first settled.

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 — 8.3 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 — 8.4 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 — 8.7 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

• Félicité — steps away
• Becoming New Iberia — steps away
• Saint Peter's College — steps away
• Shadows-on-the-Teche — steps away