Notre Dame de la Paix

Vacherie's Catholics waited a decade for a parish of their own. By 1854 French and German families had bought land for a church and cemetery, after years of attending services at St. James or in a community grocery store, but the parish was not organized until 1864. Annual parish fairs helped pay for the larger cross-shaped church begun in 1893. A one-room school opened near the cemetery in 1891, and the Sisters of the Immaculate Conception arrived in 1902 and built a convent in 1910, but the school closed in 1915 and the sisters left.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Whitney Plantation — 6.7 mi
  A museum on a former sugar plantation along the River Road that tells its story through the people who were enslaved there, with memorials to 107,000 enslaved Louisianans and 2,200 children.
• Laurel Valley Village — 12 mi
  A sugar plantation's workers' village south of Thibodaux, with cabins of about 1845, shotgun houses, a store and cemetery, and the 1887 strike and massacre in the parish around it.
• Wetlands Acadian Cultural Center — 13 mi
  A Jean Lafitte National Historical Park center on Bayou Lafourche with Acadian and bayou-life exhibits, a 200-seat theater and ranger-guided boat tours to the E. D. White house.
• E. D. White Historic Site — 16 mi
  A National Historic Landmark house of about 1790 on Bayou Lafourche, built by enslaved people and home to two Whites, a governor and a Chief Justice, with an exhibit on the bayou's history.

More markers nearby

• Vacherie — 5.1 mi
• Colonel Leopold L. Armant Historical Marker — 5.2 mi
• "Le Petit Versailles" Historical Marker — 6.1 mi
• Bourgeois Homeplace / Site Familial des Bourgeois — 6.3 mi