Oak and Pine Alley

Charles Durand had two wives and 24 children, 12 by each, and a taste for display: gold-trimmed carriages, scented baths, a statue of himself kneeling at his first wife's grave. The wedding under silver-dusted spiderwebs rests on family tradition. A Durand family-history site cites no period newspaper or record for it, and versions differ on the date, one saying May 1870, and on the guests. Writer Jim Bradshaw called it romantic and perhaps embellished. Durand died that November, poorer after the Civil War cost him his enslaved workforce and his sugar mill.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Longfellow-Evangeline State Historic Site — 1.5 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.
• African American Museum, St. Martinville — 2.0 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 — 2.0 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.
• Cypress Island Preserve at Lake Martin — 7.8 mi
  Nearly 10,000 acres of bottomland hardwood and cypress-tupelo swamp at the south end of Lake Martin, owned by The Nature Conservancy, with a boardwalk and a rookery of egrets, spoonbills and alligators.

More markers nearby

• Bayou Teche — 1.3 mi
• The Eternal Flame — 1.9 mi
• Deportation Cross — 2.0 mi
• Evangeline Oak — 2.0 mi