St. Martin Catholic Church

Before the Acadians came, enslaved people were already in the books. On June 5, 1756, Father Pierre Didier, a Benedictine from Pointe Coupée, baptized Jean dit Ingui and Marie, enslaved by the settler André Masse, and witnessed their marriage; the same day he baptized five more people Masse enslaved. The Acadians reached the Teche in mid-May 1765 with the Capuchin Father Jean-François Civrey, who became first resident pastor and called the church l'Église de la Nouvelle Acadie aux Attakapas.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• St. Martin de Tours Catholic Church — steps away
  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 — steps away
  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.
• Longfellow-Evangeline State Historic Site — 1.0 mi
  A bayou-side state site on former Attakapas hunting ground, with a raised Creole cottage of about 1815, a reproduction 1800 farmstead and its slave quarters, and the story behind Longfellow's Evangeline.
• Cypress Island Preserve at Lake Martin — 7.0 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.

More markers nearby

• Ange Marie Jan — steps away
• St. Martinville — steps away
• On This Site Lie Buried Officers of The Attakapas Militia — steps away
• Evangeline Monument — steps away