Robert Foligny Broussard

Robert Broussard's best-remembered bill never passed. In 1910 he introduced the American Hippo Bill, asking $250,000 to import hippopotamuses from Africa. The animals, the argument went, would supply meat in a shortage and eat the water hyacinth choking Louisiana's waterways. It drew wide support in Congress but died there. Broussard, born in 1864 on a plantation near New Iberia, served in the House from 1897 to 1915, then in the Senate until he died in New Iberia on April 12, 1918, at 53.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Shadows-on-the-Teche — 0.2 mi
  A National Trust site in New Iberia built 1831 to 1834 for sugar planters David and Mary Weeks, now interpreted around the 1,112 people the Weeks family enslaved, among them Charity Polk, Amos, Patty, Isaac and Louisa.
• African American Museum, St. Martinville — 8.0 mi
  A museum in the St. Martinville Cultural Heritage Center on the arrival of Africans in Southwest Louisiana, slavery, the free people of color and Reconstruction, with the fourteen-panel exhibit The Shackles of Memory.
• St. Martin de Tours Catholic Church — 8.1 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.
• Jungle Gardens and Avery Island — 8.8 mi
  A 170-acre garden and wildfowl refuge on a Gulf Coast salt dome, founded by Edward Avery McIlhenny, on an island that was a Marsh sugar plantation worked by enslaved people before Tabasco and the 1862 salt works.

More markers nearby

• Edwin Sidney Broussard — steps away
• Lieutenant Colonel Francisco Bouligny — steps away
• Old City Hall — steps away
• Louisiana's First Black Female Physician Dr. Emma Wakefield-Paillet — steps away