The Dreyfus Building

It took eighteen years to turn an idea into a museum. In 1992 Paul Schexnayder and Becky Schexnayder Owens conceived a museum for Bayou Teche country, and with Alfred "Smitty" Landry they set up the New Iberia Museum Foundation as a nonprofit. The Bayou Teche Museum opened in 2010, thanks to board members, elected officials and volunteers who kept at it. It occupies this old brick building on Main Street, and a year later the foundation bought the building beside it.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Shadows-on-the-Teche — steps away
  A National Trust site in New Iberia built 1831 to 1834 for sugar planters David and Mary Weeks, now interpreted around the 1,112 people the Weeks family enslaved, among them Charity Polk, Amos, Patty, Isaac and Louisa.
• African American Museum, St. Martinville — 8.2 mi
  A museum in the St. Martinville Cultural Heritage Center on the arrival of Africans in Southwest Louisiana, slavery, the free people of color and Reconstruction, with the fourteen-panel exhibit The Shackles of Memory.
• St. Martin de Tours Catholic Church — 8.2 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.
• Jungle Gardens and Avery Island — 8.7 mi
  A 170-acre garden and wildfowl refuge on a Gulf Coast salt dome, founded by Edward Avery McIlhenny, on an island that was a Marsh sugar plantation worked by enslaved people before Tabasco and the 1862 salt works.

More markers nearby

• The Davis Building — steps away
• Evangeline Theater — steps away
• George Rodrigue — steps away
• James Lee Burke — steps away