Pére Antoine Desiré Mégret

Before it was Abbeville, the place was called La Chapelle. In 1843 Father Mégret paid $900 for the land. The only people living on it were Joseph LeBlanc and Isabelle Broussard, and he turned their house into his chapel, which burned in 1854. Baptismal records found at Amiens in 1995 confirmed that he was born in Abbeville, France, the town most accounts say he named this one for. The village he drew followed a French provincial model, and the Magdalen Square at its center still has oaks, a fountain, a gazebo and his statue.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Jungle Gardens and Avery Island — 14 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.
• Vermilionville — 19 mi
  A living-history village of about 23 acres on Bayou Vermilion in Lafayette, opened in 1990 to interpret the Native peoples, Acadians, Creoles and people of African descent of the Attakapas region.
• Shadows-on-the-Teche — 19 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.
• St. Martin de Tours Catholic Church — 21 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.

More markers nearby

• Louisiana Story — steps away
• Saint Mary Magdalen Church — steps away
• Abbeville — steps away
• St. Mary Congregational Church — 0.3 mi