St. Martin de Tours Catholic Church

St. Martin Parish tourism calls St. Martin de Tours the Mother Church of the Acadians. It was founded in 1765, which the same office counts as the third oldest church in Louisiana, and it has served the Acadians who arrived in the 1760s. The first group of exiles reached Louisiana in 1764, and the French caretaker government settled them in the Attakapas country. The expulsion that sent them there began in 1755. The 64 Parishes encyclopedia notes that historians call it ethnic cleansing and that some estimate up to half of the roughly 15,000 exiles died.

The present church was built in the 1840s. Inside is a painting of St. Martin de Tours by Jean-Francois Moucher, and a grotto of Lourdes, built by Pierre Martinet in the late 1870s, stands outside. The square also holds the Presbytere, the Parish Hall and monuments to Evangeline and to an Attakapas warrior. By the 1810s the Acadians were divided: wealthy planters who held enslaved people, a middle class of farmers and artisans, and a large group of poor subsistence farmers from whom the Cajun people grew.

Evangeline Oak Park lies close by on Bayou Teche, where an ancient live oak, named for the heroine of Longfellow's 1847 poem, has been the town's most visited spot since the late 1800s. A boardwalk runs through the park.