Northwestern State University

Students named the teams the Demons in a contest on 8 November 1922, and in 1984 an alumnus's suggestion gave the mascot its name, Vic, short for Victory. Singer Jim Croce performed on campus in 1973 hours before the plane crash that killed him as it left Natchitoches Regional Airport. In 1996 the school was one of the first six colleges in NASA's Joint Venture Program, and in 2021 Marcus Jones became its first Black president.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Natchitoches Historic District — steps away
  The riverfront blocks of the oldest permanent settlement in the Louisiana Purchase, founded in 1714 at a Natchitoches village, with a brick-paved Front Street, Cane River frontage and the largest bousillage construction in the South.
• Fort St. Jean Baptiste State Historic Site — 0.2 mi
  A reconstruction of the 1716 French fort beside the Natchitoches village, with a palisade of nearly 2,000 pine logs, a chapel and storeroom, and living-history programs, open Wednesday to Sunday.
• Cane River Creole National Historical Park — 8.1 mi
  Oakland and Magnolia, two Cane River cotton plantations kept as they stood, told through the enslaved families who worked them, the 1864 and 1804 freedom seekers and the tenant farmers who stayed into the 1960s.
• Los Adaes State Historic Site — 12 mi
  The Spanish presidio that was the capital of Texas from 1729 to 1770, some 15 miles from French Natchitoches, now an archaeological site where Native pottery is the most abundant find.

More markers nearby

• Old Normal Hill — steps away
• Steel Magnolias — steps away
• Dr. John Sibley — 0.3 mi
• Prudhomme-Rouquier House — 0.5 mi