Triumph At Carville: A Tale of Leprosy in America

In 1916 a patient named John Early left the Louisiana Home without permission to testify before Congress, arguing that the country needed a federal leprosy hospital. A federal law followed in 1917, and Washington took the Home over in 1921. Many of the people who lived there changed their names, so staff did not always know who they were or where they came from. Graves carry the name, real or assumed, with a case number. In 1950 a patient who arrived at 19, writing as Betty Martin, put the place on the bestseller list.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• LSU Rural Life Museum — 15 mi
  Four slave cabins moved from Welham Plantation and a working-plantation row of more than twenty saved buildings, on land the Burden family held as Windrush plantation since the 1830s.
• Old State Capitol — 18 mi
  James Dakin's 1850 Gothic castle on the river bluff, gutted in the Civil War, nearly demolished in 1991 and reopened in 1994 as a free museum of political history.
• Capitol Park Museum — 18 mi
  The Louisiana State Museum in Baton Rouge: a shrimp trawler and a Civil War submarine, galleries on the slave market, resistance and Jim Crow, and the music from Armstrong to Chenier.
• Louisiana State Capitol — 18 mi
  A 450-foot Art Deco tower Huey Long pushed through in 1930, finished in 14 months, and the hallway where he was shot in 1935; free to enter and ringed by 27 acres of grounds.

More markers nearby

• The Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul — steps away
• The STAR (Carville's Patient-Published Newspaper) — steps away
• Cage Door of Harry T. Chimpanzee — steps away
• Staff Housing, U.S. Public Health Service Hospital, Carville — steps away