The Bridge of 1852

The bridge burned in the middle of a campaign. In April 1863 Nathaniel Banks's Union army moved up the Teche against Richard Taylor's Confederates, winning at Fort Bisland on April 12 and 13, with 234 Union and 450 Confederate casualties, then at Irish Bend on April 14. Taylor fell back toward Opelousas, fighting a rear-guard action at Vermilion Bayou on April 17. Banks then captured Butte-à-la-Rose, the Confederate fort on the Atchafalaya, and the city of Alexandria, and the Teche country stayed in Union hands for months.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Cypress Island Preserve at Lake Martin — 5.1 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 — 7.2 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 — 11 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.
• St. Martin de Tours Catholic Church — 11 mi
  The Mother Church of the Acadians, founded in 1765 on St. Martin Square in St. Martinville, with a late 1870s Lourdes grotto and, a block away, the Evangeline Oak on Bayou Teche.

More markers nearby

• Welcome to Breaux Bridge — steps away
• History of St. Bernard Catholic School — steps away
• Legend of Bayou Teche / La Legende du Bayou Teche — steps away
• Most Rev. Jules B. Jeanmard, D.D. — steps away