Welcome to Parks

Parks was first called Potier, and nobody is sure how it became Parks. One story blames a railroad engineer who asked a French-speaking crowd the settlement's name and heard the French word for Easter in the answer. The area was also once La Pointe de Repose, possibly from cattle drivers who herded stock into a bend of the bayou. Village settlement began after 1900, when Paul Melancon bought land for a cotton farm and subdivided town lots. Parks was incorporated in 1908 on about 330 acres, and it has barely grown since.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Cypress Island Preserve at Lake Martin — 4.4 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.
• Longfellow-Evangeline State Historic Site — 5.4 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.
• St. Martin de Tours Catholic Church — 6.3 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.
• African American Museum, St. Martinville — 6.3 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.

More markers nearby

• American Alligator — 4.3 mi
• Wetlands — 4.4 mi
• Lake Martin — 4.4 mi
• The Pellerin-Chauffe House — 4.5 mi