Patriots of the Opelousas Militia

Washington began as the Post of Opelousas in 1764, a French trading post, and a church was founded there by 1766. By 1822 the place was called Church Landing, and the town took its present name when it was incorporated in 1835. The town's own landmark list names an Old Church Landing Cemetery, said to date from about 1700, its first burying ground and later the Yellow Fever Cemetery. That older settlement lay on the bayou, where steamboats later reached the landing, long before the town grew into a port.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Le Vieux Village and the Venus House — 5.9 mi
  A heritage park in Opelousas built around the Venus House of about 1791, the home of a free Creole woman of color, Marie Francois Venus, with an old schoolhouse, Methodist church and the visitor center's zydeco music exhibit.
• Prairie Acadian Cultural Center — 24 mi
  A National Park Service center in Eunice on the Cajun prairie, with exhibits on the Acadians who settled the prairies, a Courir de Mardi Gras display, free music and cooking demonstrations, and the shuttered Liberty Theatre nearby.
• Atchafalaya Welcome Center — 28 mi
  A state welcome center inside the Atchafalaya Basin, the nation's largest river swamp, with exhibits on Basin history and life, a film, a crawfishing boat and French-speaking staff.
• Louisiana State Penitentiary Museum — 36 mi
  The Angola museum outside the penitentiary gate, opened in 1997 on the history of crime and punishment in Louisiana, on ground where convicts were leased out as what 64 Parishes calls legal slave labor.

More markers nearby

• Leon Wolff Mercantile — 0.3 mi
• Washington Museum — 0.3 mi
• Steamboat Warehouse — 0.4 mi
• Washington — 0.4 mi