The Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul

Four sisters moved into a dilapidated mansion in 1896 to nurse patients the law had confined. Their order stayed 109 years, through the state's purchase of the property, the federal takeover and the arrival of the sulfone drugs. In 1999, when operations moved to Baton Rouge, about 130 residents could take a lifetime stipend, stay in leased assisted-living space or move to a chronic care ward in the city. The sisters formally ended their mission in 2005. They left a place that had begun with seven patients in cabins.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• LSU Rural Life Museum — 15 mi
  Four slave cabins moved from Welham Plantation and a working-plantation row of more than twenty saved buildings, on land the Burden family held as Windrush plantation since the 1830s.
• Old State Capitol — 18 mi
  James Dakin's 1850 Gothic castle on the river bluff, gutted in the Civil War, nearly demolished in 1991 and reopened in 1994 as a free museum of political history.
• Capitol Park Museum — 18 mi
  The Louisiana State Museum in Baton Rouge: a shrimp trawler and a Civil War submarine, galleries on the slave market, resistance and Jim Crow, and the music from Armstrong to Chenier.
• Louisiana State Capitol — 18 mi
  A 450-foot Art Deco tower Huey Long pushed through in 1930, finished in 14 months, and the hallway where he was shot in 1935; free to enter and ringed by 27 acres of grounds.

More markers nearby

• The STAR (Carville's Patient-Published Newspaper) — steps away
• Triumph At Carville: A Tale of Leprosy in America — steps away
• Cage Door of Harry T. Chimpanzee — steps away
• Staff Housing, U.S. Public Health Service Hospital, Carville — steps away