St. Mary Congregational Church

Records of the American Missionary Association place this congregation in Abbeville by 1877, and it is described as the oldest incorporated church in Vermilion Parish with a mostly Black congregation. The Gothic Revival sanctuary dates from 1905, with a gabled three-bay front and a square corner tower of three stages. It joined the National Register in 1999. Its second pastor, James A. Herod, served thirteen years and taught in the church. The school later named for him became Abbeville's only Black high school in 1955 and closed in 1969 to 1970 as the schools desegregated.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Jungle Gardens and Avery Island — 14 mi
  A 170-acre garden and wildfowl refuge on a Gulf Coast salt dome, founded by Edward Avery McIlhenny, on an island that was a Marsh sugar plantation worked by enslaved people before Tabasco and the 1862 salt works.
• Vermilionville — 19 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.
• Shadows-on-the-Teche — 19 mi
  A National Trust site in New Iberia built 1831 to 1834 for sugar planters David and Mary Weeks, now interpreted around the 1,112 people the Weeks family enslaved, among them Charity Polk, Amos, Patty, Isaac and Louisa.
• St. Martin de Tours Catholic Church — 21 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.

More markers nearby

• Louisiana Story — 0.2 mi
• Abbeville — 0.2 mi
• Pére Antoine Desiré Mégret — 0.3 mi
• Saint Mary Magdalen Church — 0.3 mi