Pont Breaux, Louisiane

Breaux Bridge grew slowly, a town of the Teche before it was a town of anything else. A church parish was established in 1847, and incorporation followed twelve years later, in 1859. Acadian settlers had come in the 1760s and Scholastique Breaux laid out the town in 1829, yet even by the 1880 census Breaux Bridge counted only 443 residents. Jules Jeanmard, born there in 1879, was a small-town boy who went on to become the first bishop of Lafayette.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Cypress Island Preserve at Lake Martin — 4.9 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.
• Vermilionville — 7.1 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.
• Longfellow-Evangeline State Historic Site — 11 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 — 11 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

• Most Rev. Jules B. Jeanmard, D.D. — steps away
• Birthplace of Bishop Jules Jeanmard — steps away
• Breaux Bridge / Pont-Breaux — steps away
• Cajun Warrior — steps away