Old City Hall

New Iberia's first year was a scramble. The party under Francisco Bouligny left in January 1779, and one soldier called the Atchafalaya crossing "fifteen days of Purgatory." Their first site, near a Chitimacha village now called Charenton, flooded. In April Bouligny paid 400 pesos to Joseph Prevost dit Colette for about thirty arpents of frontage at Petite Fausse Pointe, where a portage turned a fifteen-mile water route into a two-mile walk. Flax, hemp, corn and tobacco did poorly, and many Malagueños drifted to cattle on the prairie.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Shadows-on-the-Teche — 0.2 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.
• African American Museum, St. Martinville — 8.0 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 — 8.1 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

• Louisiana's First Black Female Physician Dr. Emma Wakefield-Paillet — steps away
• Kathleen Babineaux Blanco — steps away
• Lieutenant Colonel Francisco Bouligny — steps away
• Robert Foligny Broussard — steps away