Saint Peter Roman Catholic Church

The 1888 church was the work of James Freret, a New Orleans architect trained at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris under Charles-Auguste Questel. When the Civil War began he left France for the Confederate engineers and was wounded at the siege of Port Hudson. Back in New Orleans in 1865, he opened his own practice, which produced the Jewish Widows and Orphans Home of 1868 and a Donaldsonville store now on the National Register. His Victorian Gothic church stood until 1953, when a design by Owen Southwell replaced it.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Shadows-on-the-Teche — steps away
  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 — 8.2 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 — 8.2 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 — 8.6 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

• Essanee Theater — steps away
• Wormser's Department Store — steps away
• Evangeline Theater — steps away
• William G. "Bunk" Johnson — steps away