Site of First Acadian Settlers in Louisiana

Louisiana has a second Acadian Coast. The name belongs first to the Gulf shore of New Brunswick, where Acadians were allowed to return in 1764, nine years after the British expelled them. Then it was applied to this reach of the Mississippi, where exiles began settling in the same year. Historians use the Louisiana label mainly for what is now St. James Parish and sometimes stretch it upriver into Ascension. The same two words mark two answers to one catastrophe: families who went back north, and families who ended up on a flat river bank far from home.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Whitney Plantation — 12 mi
  A museum on a former sugar plantation along the River Road that tells its story through the people who were enslaved there, with memorials to 107,000 enslaved Louisianans and 2,200 children.
• E. D. White Historic Site — 14 mi
  A National Historic Landmark house of about 1790 on Bayou Lafourche, built by enslaved people and home to two Whites, a governor and a Chief Justice, with an exhibit on the bayou's history.
• Wetlands Acadian Cultural Center — 15 mi
  A Jean Lafitte National Historical Park center on Bayou Lafourche with Acadian and bayou-life exhibits, a 200-seat theater and ranger-guided boat tours to the E. D. White house.
• Laurel Valley Village — 16 mi
  A sugar plantation's workers' village south of Thibodaux, with cabins of about 1845, shotgun houses, a store and cemetery, and the 1887 strike and massacre in the parish around it.

More markers nearby

• St. Jacques de Cabahanoce — steps away
• Judge Poché Plantation House Historical Marker — 0.8 mi
• Convent — 0.9 mi
• Young Pilgrim Baptist Church — 1.1 mi