Preservation in Natchitoches

Preservation here began with drawings and a threatened house. In 1940 a Historic American Buildings Survey team from Washington came to record the town's old structures. The town's first local preservation group followed, formed by Natchitoches women so that the city would not sell the Lemee House to a developer; the association that grew from it dates itself to 1941 in one place and 1944 in another. It still runs Melrose and the Lemee House, and the work it began, now more than sixty years long, helped lead to the landmark district and the Cane River National Heritage Area.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Natchitoches Historic District — 0.3 mi
  The riverfront blocks of the oldest permanent settlement in the Louisiana Purchase, founded in 1714 at a Natchitoches village, with a brick-paved Front Street, Cane River frontage and the largest bousillage construction in the South.
• Fort St. Jean Baptiste State Historic Site — 0.4 mi
  A reconstruction of the 1716 French fort beside the Natchitoches village, with a palisade of nearly 2,000 pine logs, a chapel and storeroom, and living-history programs, open Wednesday to Sunday.
• Cane River Creole National Historical Park — 8.2 mi
  Oakland and Magnolia, two Cane River cotton plantations kept as they stood, told through the enslaved families who worked them, the 1864 and 1804 freedom seekers and the tenant farmers who stayed into the 1960s.
• Los Adaes State Historic Site — 12 mi
  The Spanish presidio that was the capital of Texas from 1729 to 1770, some 15 miles from French Natchitoches, now an archaeological site where Native pottery is the most abundant find.

More markers nearby

• Judge Porter House — steps away
• Prudhomme-Rouquier House — steps away
• Fort St. Jean Baptiste (Reconstruction) — 0.2 mi
• The Red River Campaign — 0.2 mi