Roque House (circa 1797)

Credit for the cottage goes to Yves, called Pacalé, a formerly enslaved man who built it in 1803 on his 91-acre farm about twenty-two miles down Cane River, using cypress half-timbers filled with bousillage, a mix of mud, Spanish moss and deer hair. He died some fifteen years later, aged seventy-five. The house took its later name from Madame Philamene Roque, a granddaughter of Augustin Metoyer, who stayed in it until her death in 1941. In 1967 Museum Contents, Inc. moved it to the riverbank, damaging the chimney and losing one bedroom.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Natchitoches Historic District — 0.7 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 — 0.7 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 — 8.4 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 — 13 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

• Louis Juchereau de St. Denis (1676-1744) — steps away
• Natchitoches Indians — steps away
• Site of Fort Claiborne — steps away
• Basilica of the Immaculate Conception — steps away