Prairie des Canots Seat of Justice

Before Monroe had a name it had a Frenchman from Eymet. Jean Baptiste Filhiol, born in 1740, left France at 23 for Santo Domingo, missed a ship in Philadelphia in 1779 and landed in New Orleans instead. He aided Gálvez's campaigns against the British, married a widow at Opelousas in 1782, and in 1783 went upriver by keelboat with soldiers, enslaved people and his wife. He based himself first at Ecore-a-Fabry, now Camden, Arkansas, and moved to Prairie des Canots in 1785, when the district counted 207 non-Indian residents.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Masur Museum of Art — 0.6 mi
  A 1929 limestone Tudor house on South Grand Street, built by a Monroe lumberman and given to the city in 1963 by the Masur family to become its art museum.
• Biedenharn Museum and Gardens — 1.6 mi
  The 1913 Monroe home of the man the museum credits with first bottling Coca-Cola, with a Coca-Cola museum, his daughter's Bible collection and her gardens.
• Chennault Aviation and Military Museum — 3.7 mi
  A Monroe museum that began as a 1986 reunion of Selman Field airmen and now holds Flying Tigers displays, Delta's Monroe beginnings and a park of retired aircraft.
• Northeast Louisiana Delta African American Heritage Museum — 5.6 mi
  A museum chartered in 1994 that tells the story of the Black pioneers of Monroe and northeast Louisiana, with local art, quilts and the Louisiana African American Heritage Trail's only Ouachita Parish stop.

More markers nearby

• Ouachita Parish High School — steps away
• Mr. Jack Hayes / Mrs. Ann Stapp Hayes — steps away
• Fort Miro — steps away
• St. Matthew Catholic Church — steps away