Shadows-on-the-Teche

The family ground at Shadows holds a harder history than the front lawn suggests. In 1856 David and Mary Weeks's daughter and her two children died in the Last Island hurricane and were buried on the property, and the Weeks cemetery there took its last burial in 1958, that of William Weeks Hall. Over the years the holding shrank from 158 acres to about 2.5. A second plaque, set by the National Park Service in 1975, marks the 1974 National Historic Landmark designation.

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 — 8.3 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 — 8.3 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 — 8.7 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

• Bayou Teche — steps away
• New Iberia Shipwreck — steps away
• George Rodrigue — steps away
• Saint Peter's College — steps away