St. Stephen's Episcopal Church and Cemetery

St. Stephen's is the oldest brick church building in Pointe Coupee Parish, built in 1848 in Gothic Revival style with J. A. Wills named as architect. Bishop Leonidas Polk, later a Confederate general, consecrated it. The churchyard holds a monument to an unknown Confederate soldier, dated 1901 in one account and 1904 in another, one of the Lost Cause memorials raised across the South that presented the war as a noble cause rather than a war over slavery. In 1795 enslaved people had outnumbered white residents here by more than two to one.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Louisiana State Penitentiary Museum — 5.6 mi
  The Angola museum outside the penitentiary gate, opened in 1997 on the history of crime and punishment in Louisiana, on ground where convicts were leased out as what 64 Parishes calls legal slave labor.
• Rosedown Plantation State Historic Site — 19 mi
  A cotton plantation worked by hundreds of enslaved people, whose names survive in an 1862 succession list; the Turnbull house and gardens, and the quarters nobody has yet found.
• Audubon State Historic Site — 22 mi
  Oakley House, where Audubon taught drawing and painted 32 birds in 1821, and the two cabins behind it where four Black families lived through slavery, Reconstruction and Jim Crow.
• Port Hudson State Historic Site — 27 mi
  The 48-day siege of 1863 on the Mississippi bluffs, where the Louisiana Native Guards and Captain Andre Cailloux led the first assault; earthworks, a six-mile trail and a museum.

More markers nearby

• Birthplace of Buddy Guy — 3.4 mi
• Old Hickory — 6.3 mi
• John Archer Lejeune — 6.5 mi
• Mississippi River — 6.7 mi