Saint Mary Magdalen Church

The parish church is a story of rebuilding. The 1884 church and its attached rectory burned on March 22, 1907, and a temporary frame church took their place. Eugene Guillot was the builder of the present church, finished in 1911. It is red brick with buff-colored trim, Gothic and Romanesque Revival in style, laid out as a cross with buttresses bracing the walls. The rectory followed in 1921, and in 1975 the sacristy cellar was made into a weekday Mass chapel. The church, rectory and cemetery were listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1988.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Jungle Gardens and Avery Island — 14 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.
• Vermilionville — 19 mi
  A living-history village of about 23 acres on Bayou Vermilion in Lafayette, opened in 1990 to interpret the Native peoples, Acadians, Creoles and people of African descent of the Attakapas region.
• Shadows-on-the-Teche — 19 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.
• St. Martin de Tours Catholic Church — 21 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.

More markers nearby

• Pére Antoine Desiré Mégret — steps away
• Louisiana Story — steps away
• Abbeville — steps away
• St. Mary Congregational Church — 0.3 mi