St. John's Episcopal Church

The church began as a contract. In September 1843 the parish hired builders Absalom Kees and James Frost, and the document refers five times to a plan by Bishop Leonidas Polk. It also cites a "style of Lafever," possibly a nod to the architect Minard Lefever's builders' guide. The result is brick Greek Revival, with pilasters and a pedimented front, unlike the Gothic Revival churches Polk founded elsewhere in Louisiana. A recessed chancel followed in 1867 or 1868. Union troops occupied the church during the Civil War and damaged its interior.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Wetlands Acadian Cultural Center — steps away
  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 — 2.2 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.
• E. D. White Historic Site — 5.7 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.
• Southdown Plantation and Terrebonne Museum — 15 mi
  A Greek Revival sugar plantation house in Houma, worked by 233 enslaved people by 1852, with the last Terrebonne mill's story and a worker's cabin of about 1885.

More markers nearby

• Leonidas Polk — steps away
• St. John's Historic Cemetery — steps away
• John Carlton Beatty — steps away
• Marcus Pennington Zills — steps away