Wormser's Department Store

Main Street was once lined with family stores run largely by Jewish merchants from Poland and Alsace. Jacob Davis opened a dry goods store in the 1870s, and by 1876 A. Lehman and Company was the largest department store in town. Alfred Lewald ran a big downtown department store and founded an oil company. The last of the group included Creim's women's clothing, Davis's furniture, Kahn's pharmacy, Lewald's and Steinberg's furs. The community that ran them was small: Gates of Prayer counted about fifty families around 1950.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Shadows-on-the-Teche — steps away
  A National Trust site in New Iberia built 1831 to 1834 for sugar planters David and Mary Weeks, now interpreted around the 1,112 people the Weeks family enslaved, among them Charity Polk, Amos, Patty, Isaac and Louisa.
• African American Museum, St. Martinville — 8.1 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.
• St. Martin de Tours Catholic Church — 8.2 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.
• Jungle Gardens and Avery Island — 8.7 mi
  A 170-acre garden and wildfowl refuge on a Gulf Coast salt dome, founded by Edward Avery McIlhenny, on an island that was a Marsh sugar plantation worked by enslaved people before Tabasco and the 1862 salt works.

More markers nearby

• William G. "Bunk" Johnson — steps away
• James Lee Burke — steps away
• Evangeline Theater — steps away
• The Dreyfus Building — steps away