The Eternal Flame

The first Acadians were assigned to the Attakapas district in 1765 by Louisiana's governor, Jean-Jacques Blaise d'Abbadie, and were led, in the usual account, by Joseph Broussard. More families came up from Pointe Coupee in 1768 and 1769. They arrived on ground that already had a name from the Atakapa, in a post where priests had been recording baptisms since 1756. The flame at the Acadian Memorial rises from a granite oval in the memorial garden, and the memorial describes it as a symbol of a culture's power to renew itself after hardship.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• African American Museum, St. Martinville — steps away
  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 — steps away
  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.
• Longfellow-Evangeline State Historic Site — 1.0 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.
• Cypress Island Preserve at Lake Martin — 7.0 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.

More markers nearby

• Deportation Cross — steps away
• Evangeline Oak — steps away
• The Old Castillo Hotel — steps away
• Henry Wadsworth Longfellow — steps away