St. Alphonsus Church

Maurice began as Mauriceville, named for Maurice Villien, a native of Savoy who reached America in 1855. He sold goods in New Orleans, New Iberia and Milton before he and his wife built a house and grocery here. Early Sunday services met in a small schoolhouse on his land, and the church was finished in January 1893. The first school, Broussard Cove School, opened in 1885 on land Joseph Clark gave, moved here in 1899 onto Villien land and burned in 1914. The village was incorporated in 1911, and his son Joseph served as mayor until 1928.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Vermilionville — 11 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.
• Cypress Island Preserve at Lake Martin — 15 mi
  Nearly 10,000 acres of bottomland hardwood and cypress-tupelo swamp at the south end of Lake Martin, owned by The Nature Conservancy, with a boardwalk and a rookery of egrets, spoonbills and alligators.
• St. Martin de Tours Catholic Church — 18 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.
• African American Museum, St. Martinville — 18 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.

More markers nearby

• Bayou Vermilion — 8.9 mi
• James Domengeaux — 9.2 mi
• Abbeville — 9.2 mi
• Saint Mary Magdalen Church — 9.2 mi