Poste Des Avoyelles

In 1796 an order set the headquarters of Spain's Red River District at Avoyelles, and Carlos Luis Boucher de Grand Pre, the district's lieutenant governor, moved here to run the valley from the post. A local history calls Avoyelles the only place that ever headquartered a regional government. His own plantation lay north of present Marksville, in the area now bounded by Main Street, Cedar Lane, Landry Beauregard Lane and Tunica Drive. The Tunica were settling in the same neighborhood from the 1780s, which is why a Spanish post and a Native village shared this prairie.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Avoyelles Parish Courthouse: Solomon Northup Marker — 1.0 mi
  The Marksville courthouse where Solomon Northup was freed in January 1853, with a marker and a 2026 bronze that shows him rising from the mud.
• Tunica-Biloxi Museum — 2.1 mi
  The Tunica-Biloxi Tribe of Louisiana's own museum at Marksville, built around the Tunica Treasure that the tribe won back in court.
• Epps House: Solomon Northup's Gateway to Freedom — 21 mi
  The Creole cottage Solomon Northup helped build for the man who enslaved him, moved twice and now a small museum on the LSU Alexandria campus.
• Arna Bontemps African American Museum — 25 mi
  The restored Alexandria house where the Harlem Renaissance writer Arna Bontemps was born in 1902, on the Louisiana African American Heritage Trail.

More markers nearby

• Joffrion-Roy-Luke Home — 0.7 mi
• Founding Of Marksville — 1.0 mi
• Solomon Northup, "Twelve Years a Slave" — 1.0 mi
• The First Bowie Knife — 1.0 mi