Historical Marker
The Valery Thibodeaux House
Breaux Bridge, St. Martin County · Louisiana
The 173rd New York was a Brooklyn regiment, also called the 4th Metropolitan Guard, sent to New Orleans in December 1862. It fought at Fort Bisland on April 12 and 13, 1863, then made expeditions toward Breaux Bridge, Opelousas and Alexandria. In the end it lost 175 men, and disease killed far more of them than combat: two officers and 129 enlisted men died of illness, against six officers and 38 enlisted men killed or mortally wounded. Its war ran on through the Port Hudson siege and the Shenandoah Valley, and it mustered out in October 1865.
Where it stands
30.27322, -91.89148 · Directions
Worth the stop nearby
- Cypress Island Preserve at Lake Martin — 4.9 miNearly 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.
- Vermilionville — 7.5 miA living-history village of about 23 acres on Bayou Vermilion in Lafayette, opened in 1990 to interpret the Native peoples, Acadians, Creoles and people of African descent of the Attakapas region.
- Longfellow-Evangeline State Historic Site — 10 miA 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.
- St. Martin de Tours Catholic Church — 11 miThe 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.