Prudhomme-Rouquier House

Two-story bousillage is the point of this house. Cypress posts are filled with a mud, moss and deer-hair mix, and the city's visitor site calls it the only known true two-story bousillage building in the country. Sources disagree on its age: that listing says it went up between 1790 and 1811, while the National Historic Landmark district nomination gives 1806. Around 1825 the exterior was remodeled to look Federal or Greek Revival, hiding a French Creole structure under newer fashion.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Natchitoches Historic District — 0.4 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

• The Red River Campaign — steps away
• First Mass in Natchitoches — steps away
• Basilica of the Immaculate Conception — steps away
• Dr. John Sibley — 0.3 mi