The Texas and Pacific Railroad Depot

Built in 1927, the depot had separate entrances, waiting areas and ticket booths for white and Black travelers. Talk of making it an African American heritage museum began in the 1980s but took decades. The city signed a lease with the National Park Service in 2019, and the building reopened in 2024 as the park's headquarters and visitor center. Next City reported that the rehabilitation drew a $2 million loan from BOM Bank, a community lender, and about $500,000 of earlier stabilization by the heritage area.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Natchitoches Historic District — 0.5 mi
  The riverfront blocks of the oldest permanent settlement in the Louisiana Purchase, founded in 1714 at a Natchitoches village, with a brick-paved Front Street, Cane River frontage and the largest bousillage construction in the South.
• Fort St. Jean Baptiste State Historic Site — 0.7 mi
  A reconstruction of the 1716 French fort beside the Natchitoches village, with a palisade of nearly 2,000 pine logs, a chapel and storeroom, and living-history programs, open Wednesday to Sunday.
• Cane River Creole National Historical Park — 8.6 mi
  Oakland and Magnolia, two Cane River cotton plantations kept as they stood, told through the enslaved families who worked them, the 1864 and 1804 freedom seekers and the tenant farmers who stayed into the 1960s.
• Los Adaes State Historic Site — 12 mi
  The Spanish presidio that was the capital of Texas from 1729 to 1770, some 15 miles from French Natchitoches, now an archaeological site where Native pottery is the most abundant find.

More markers nearby

• Natchitoches residents fought hard for civil rights — steps away
• Architecture of Segregation — steps away
• Basilica of the Immaculate Conception — 0.4 mi
• First Mass in Natchitoches — 0.4 mi