Pierre Dugat Home Site

Pierre Dugat's 1776 Spanish grant was made on land with a longer human record. In 1760 the Eastern Atakapa chief Kinemo sold land between the Vermilion River and Bayou Teche to Gabriel Fuselier de la Claire. The Opelousa then destroyed the Eastern Atakapa bands, yet in 1771 Quitachoulabenak led about 500 people near modern Lafayette. After the 1803 Louisiana Purchase land passed to settlers while smallpox and cholera took a heavy toll, and in 1805 the Indian agent John Sibley estimated about 50 Atakapa men in Louisiana.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Vermilionville — 2.9 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.
• Cypress Island Preserve at Lake Martin — 6.4 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.
• Longfellow-Evangeline State Historic Site — 13 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.
• St. Martin de Tours Catholic Church — 13 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

• Holy Rosary Institute — 1.5 mi
• The Triangle (Ti-fer) — 1.7 mi
• Miss Rose's Bar — 1.7 mi
• Welcome to Freetown / Bienvenue à Freetown — 2.7 mi