The Erath Building

August Erath reached New Orleans on October 31, 1860, at seventeen. He went back to Europe in 1862 and returned in 1866, then kept books for big New Orleans breweries until 1876. That spring he moved to New Iberia and built a brewery, later adding a soda and seltzer water factory. In 1884 he opened a hardware business in this building, said to be the largest between New Orleans and Houston. He served on the town council from 1885 and organized the town's first regular Board of Health.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Shadows-on-the-Teche — 0.5 mi
  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 — 7.9 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 — 7.9 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 Episcopal Church Of The Epiphany — steps away
• A Walk of Faith — steps away
• Lieutenant Colonel Francisco Bouligny — 0.3 mi
• Louisiana's First Black Female Physician Dr. Emma Wakefield-Paillet — 0.3 mi