St. Paul's Methodist Church

After the congregation formed in 1865, St. Paul's first home was a one-room frame building that also served as the first school for African American children in Shreveport. In 1889 the church moved to a larger building on Caddo Street, in the low ground that gave the neighborhood its name, St. Paul's Bottoms, and the present Gothic Revival church was completed in 1926. The Bottoms was a Black neighborhood of shotgun houses, hotels for Black travelers, professional offices and the Calanthean Temple, and it declined from the 1960s. The area now carries the name Ledbetter Heights.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Shreveport Municipal Auditorium — 0.7 mi
  The Art Deco hall of 1929 where the Louisiana Hayride went out over KWKH from 1948 to 1960 and where Elvis Presley first played Shreveport on October 16, 1954.
• Spring Street Museum — 1.1 mi
  An 1866 bank building downtown that also held a Freedman's Savings and Trust branch in 1870, now a free LSUS-run museum with a Victorian parlor and the original vault.
• Shreveport Water Works Museum — 1.1 mi
  An 1887 brick pumping station on McNeill Street where Worthington steam pumps ran until 1980, now a free museum and a National Historic Landmark.
• Louisiana State Exhibit Museum — 2.0 mi
  A circular Art Deco museum of 1939 on the Shreveport fairgrounds, with a 1,000-year-old Caddo log boat, rotunda murals and dioramas of early Caddo Parish.

More markers nearby

• Central School — steps away
• Allendale Fire — 0.4 mi
• This Marks the Site of Battery 7 — 0.5 mi
• Calanthean Temple — 0.6 mi