St. Mary's Orphanage

Bishop Jules Jeanmard opened St. Mary's Orphanage in the mid-1920s as a complex of three buildings on West St. Mary Boulevard. In 1986 Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital demolished the two main ones, and the loss became a spur for protecting what Lafayette still had: the city passed its first Historic Preservation Ordinance in 1988, creating the Lafayette Preservation Commission, and the nonprofit Preservation Alliance of Lafayette followed. The one building left at 605 West St. Mary Boulevard was added to the local historic register on September 4, 1996, as number 043.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Vermilionville — 1.8 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.
• Cypress Island Preserve at Lake Martin — 7.6 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.
• Longfellow-Evangeline State Historic Site — 13 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.
• St. Martin de Tours Catholic Church — 13 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

• Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de La Fayette — 0.2 mi
• General Alfred Mouton — 0.3 mi
• Lafayette Museum / Le Musée de Lafayette — 0.4 mi
• Dr. Edwin L. Stephens — 0.4 mi