Stephanie-Martin Duralde House

Martin Duralde reached North America in 1767 to work in the fur trade, helped lay out the first square of St. Louis, and ended his days on Bayou Teche. His notes are an important source on the Atakapa, Chitimacha and Opelousa languages. When he died in 1822, his will freed some of the people he had enslaved, but most were sold at auction with the estate. The house now called Maison Stephanie was completed in 1796.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Atchafalaya Welcome Center — 9.3 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.
• Cypress Island Preserve at Lake Martin — 11 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.
• Vermilionville — 12 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.
• Longfellow-Evangeline State Historic Site — 15 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.

More markers nearby

• Louis Hebert — 1.9 mi
• Poché's — 3.3 mi
• Welcome to Arnaudville — 4.2 mi
• The Bridge of 1852 — 5.6 mi