Old Normal Hill

Three of the four white columns from the Bullard mansion still stand on the Hill, and students treat them as unofficial symbols of Northwestern State. The Natchitoches town and parish bought the former Bullard convent property in 1884 for the new Louisiana State Normal School. The quadrangle was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1980 as the Normal Hill Historic District. In 2006 a limestone boulder known as the Rock was set out for student groups to paint.

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 — 0.3 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 — 8.0 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

• Northwestern State University — steps away
• Steel Magnolias — steps away
• Dr. John Sibley — 0.4 mi
• Prudhomme-Rouquier House — 0.6 mi