The Great Migration (Natchitoches Depot)

Louisiana was majority Black until about 1890, and the departures show in the numbers: the state's Black share fell from about 47 percent in 1900 to under 30 percent in 1980. Texas and Louisiana sent a disproportionate share of the newcomers who reached Los Angeles and San Francisco, where San Francisco's Black share rose from under 1 percent in 1940 to 5.6 percent in 1950 and 10 percent in 1960. Migrants usually bought the cheapest rail ticket to a place where relatives or friends already lived.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Natchitoches Historic District — 0.5 mi
  The riverfront blocks of the oldest permanent settlement in the Louisiana Purchase, founded in 1714 at a Natchitoches village, with a brick-paved Front Street, Cane River frontage and the largest bousillage construction in the South.
• Fort St. Jean Baptiste State Historic Site — 0.7 mi
  A reconstruction of the 1716 French fort beside the Natchitoches village, with a palisade of nearly 2,000 pine logs, a chapel and storeroom, and living-history programs, open Wednesday to Sunday.
• Cane River Creole National Historical Park — 8.6 mi
  Oakland and Magnolia, two Cane River cotton plantations kept as they stood, told through the enslaved families who worked them, the 1864 and 1804 freedom seekers and the tenant farmers who stayed into the 1960s.
• Los Adaes State Historic Site — 12 mi
  The Spanish presidio that was the capital of Texas from 1729 to 1770, some 15 miles from French Natchitoches, now an archaeological site where Native pottery is the most abundant find.

More markers nearby

• Architecture of Segregation — steps away
• Natchitoches residents fought hard for civil rights — steps away
• The Texas and Pacific Railroad Depot — steps away
• Oakland Plantation (Depot Street) — steps away