Historical Marker
St. John Baptist Church
Dorseyville, Iberville County · Louisiana
Basile Dorsey was a Black preacher and landowner, and the village of Dorseyville took his name. The cornerstone of his church was laid in 1869 and the building was finished around 1871. It is a basilica-plan frame church five bays deep, with a gallery on three sides inside. Tall windows light a mostly Greek Revival body, and a three-stage tower at the center carries Italianate details. The church was built for a local African American congregation and is believed to be the oldest African American church in the region.
Where it stands
30.17728, -91.16057 · Directions
Worth the stop nearby
- LSU Rural Life Museum — 16 miFour slave cabins moved from Welham Plantation and a working-plantation row of more than twenty saved buildings, on land the Burden family held as Windrush plantation since the 1830s.
- Old State Capitol — 19 miJames Dakin's 1850 Gothic castle on the river bluff, gutted in the Civil War, nearly demolished in 1991 and reopened in 1994 as a free museum of political history.
- Capitol Park Museum — 19 miThe Louisiana State Museum in Baton Rouge: a shrimp trawler and a Civil War submarine, galleries on the slave market, resistance and Jim Crow, and the music from Armstrong to Chenier.
- Louisiana State Capitol — 19 miA 450-foot Art Deco tower Huey Long pushed through in 1930, finished in 14 months, and the hallway where he was shot in 1935; free to enter and ringed by 27 acres of grounds.