Nicholas Provôt

Provost grew sugar with enslaved labor on land that reached the St. Mary Parish line, and he held it until he died in 1816. His neighbor Pierre Zerangue had obtained about 1,052 acres from the Spanish government in the 1700s. The town that bears John Jeanerette's name was incorporated in 1878, and Joseph E. Provost became its first mayor. In the 1800s free people of color settled along the bayou north of town, in the area now called Grand Marais. Most sources spell the family name Provost.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Chitimacha Museum — 8.1 mi
  The Chitimacha Tribe of Louisiana's own museum at Charenton: the tribe's account of its territory, the French wars and enslavement, the land held in trust, and river cane baskets.
• Shadows-on-the-Teche — 11 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.
• Grevemberg House Museum — 12 mi
  Franklin's 1851 Greek Revival townhouse, the official St. Mary Parish museum, saved from demolition by one vote and set in the Franklin Historic District on Bayou Teche.
• Jungle Gardens and Avery Island — 15 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

• Beau Pre-Circa 1828 — 4.1 mi
• Alligators! — 11 mi
• Félicité — 11 mi
• Becoming New Iberia — 11 mi