On This Site Lie Buried Officers of The Attakapas Militia

The war that Spain joined in 1779 reached the Teche as a levy. Bernardo de Gálvez left New Orleans on August 27 with about 520 regulars, 60 militiamen, 80 free Black and mulatto fighters and ten American volunteers, then gathered some 600 more on the march, among them Indigenous people and Acadians. He took Fort Bute on September 7. After bombardment of Baton Rouge began on September 21, the British surrendered; 375 regulars were captured, and Spanish losses were nine killed and 39 wounded. Baton Rouge stayed Spanish until the war ended.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• St. Martin de Tours Catholic Church — steps away
  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.
• African American Museum, St. Martinville — steps away
  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.
• Longfellow-Evangeline State Historic Site — 1.0 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.
• Cypress Island Preserve at Lake Martin — 7.0 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

• Evangeline Monument — steps away
• St. Martin Catholic Church — steps away
• Ange Marie Jan — steps away
• Attakapa Indian — steps away