St. Martinville

This was a town that stood on a church's land. In 1771 Bernard Dautrive gave land for the church and the priest's house. In 1818 the church wardens set up a lease-purchase plan for the church's lands: buyers paid a set sum over twelve years, and then a continuing yearly rent to the church. The plan helped establish the business district around the church square, so the parish drew income from the ground under the town's shops. The church had been incorporated by the legislature in 1814.

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 — 6.9 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. Martin Catholic Church — steps away
• Attakapa Indian — steps away
• On This Site Lie Buried Officers of The Attakapas Militia — steps away