Steamboat Warehouse

Francois Corso, who built this warehouse, also built the De La Morandiere house on St. John Street about 1830. The town's own landmark list dates the warehouse to about 1820, earlier than the marker's c. 1829, and calls it the last of the old steamboat warehouses on Bayou Courtableau. The trade it served faded after the railroad reached Opelousas in 1896 and drew residents away, and the last steamboat left the downtown wharf in 1900. A restaurant has used the building for more than thirty years.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Le Vieux Village and the Venus House — 6.0 mi
  A heritage park in Opelousas built around the Venus House of about 1791, the home of a free Creole woman of color, Marie Francois Venus, with an old schoolhouse, Methodist church and the visitor center's zydeco music exhibit.
• Prairie Acadian Cultural Center — 24 mi
  A National Park Service center in Eunice on the Cajun prairie, with exhibits on the Acadians who settled the prairies, a Courir de Mardi Gras display, free music and cooking demonstrations, and the shuttered Liberty Theatre nearby.
• Atchafalaya Welcome Center — 28 mi
  A state welcome center inside the Atchafalaya Basin, the nation's largest river swamp, with exhibits on Basin history and life, a film, a crawfishing boat and French-speaking staff.
• Louisiana State Penitentiary Museum — 36 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.

More markers nearby

• Washington Museum — steps away
• Leon Wolff Mercantile — steps away
• Washington — steps away
• Bayou Courtableau — 0.2 mi