Ancien Cimetiere Catholique
Abbeville, Vermilion Parish, Louisiana
Marker Inscription
Ancien Cimetiere Catholique. Le 25 juillet, 1843, Père Antoine Désiré Mégret a acheté 160 arpents de terre a Joseph LeBlanc pour la construction d'une église, d'un presbytère, et d'un cimetière. Joseph LeBlanc fut enterré ici en 1854. La tombe la plus ancienne est celle d'Eufemie (Euphemie) Broussard, enterré en 1852.
Erected by Jean Lafitte Historic Park and Preserve
The Story
In the summer of 1843, the missionary priest Père Antoine Désiré Mégret purchased 160 arpents of land along the bayou to establish a church, a rectory, and a burial ground — the seed from which the town of Abbeville grew. The oldest surviving grave belongs to Eufemie Broussard, laid to rest in 1852, with the land's seller, Joseph LeBlanc, buried here two years later. The cemetery preserves the French Catholic roots of Louisiana's Acadian country in stone and inscription.
Why it matters
This ground marks the founding footprint of a Cajun-country town and the enduring French Catholic culture that shaped south Louisiana's identity.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
To read this marker in French is to be reminded that south Louisiana was, and in many ways still is, a French-speaking world. In the mid-nineteenth century, the language of daily life, prayer, and record-keeping across the bayou country was French, carried by Acadian and Creole families and reinforced by priests sent from France itself.
The surrounding region — the prairies and waterways of Vermilion Parish — was frontier land in the 1840s, only a few decades into American governance. Communities here often formed not around a fort or a market but around a church, the institution that tied dispersed rural families together.
This burial ground marks one such beginning. Set aside in the early 1840s along the bayou for a church, a rectory, and a cemetery, it is the founding footprint of a Cajun-country town whose culture still speaks, sings, and prays in echoes of that older French world.
People & events
In the summer of 1843, the missionary priest Père Antoine Désiré Mégret acquired 160 arpents of land from Joseph LeBlanc, intending to build a church, a presbytère, and a cemetery. That act of acquisition was, in effect, the founding of a town — the ground consecrated before the streets were laid.
The story here is bound up with the people whose names endure on the marker. Joseph LeBlanc, who sold the land, was laid to rest in this cemetery in 1854, joining the community his sale had helped create.
The oldest surviving grave is that of Eufemie — also written Euphemie — Broussard, buried in 1852. Her resting place predates most of what would rise around it. In the plain arithmetic of these dates lies the whole early chapter of a French Catholic settlement taking hold on the Louisiana prairie.
Its place in the American story
That this marker is written in French is itself part of the American story. The United States has always been a country of many mother tongues, and few places hold onto theirs as tenaciously as French Louisiana. A bilingual memorial to a town's founding is a small monument to that persistence.
The deeper significance is cultural endurance. The French Catholic roots planted in grounds like this one did not fade — they grew into the distinctive Cajun and Creole culture that gives south Louisiana its unmistakable character, from its cuisine to its celebrations to its faith.
A founding cemetery is where that heritage is written most plainly, in stone and in language. It connects a single small town on a Louisiana bayou to the larger truth that America was built, again and again, by immigrant communities determined to keep who they were.
If you visit
Walk slowly, and let the French on the marker set your frame of mind. You are visiting a place where language and faith arrived together and stayed.
Look for the oldest stones and the dates that reach back to the 1850s. Some inscriptions may themselves be in French — read them aloud if you can, and hear the sound of the community that made this place. The surnames carved here still belong to families throughout the parish.
This is a contemplative stop rather than a busy attraction, so give it the unhurried time it deserves. On a road trip through Acadiana, it pairs naturally with the town's living streets nearby — see where the community began here, then go find how it lives today.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · Père Antoine Désiré Mégret
- · Joseph LeBlanc
- · Eufemie Broussard
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Old Catholic Cemetery
Abbeville, LA
On July 25, 1843, Père Antoine Désiré Mégret — the French priest who founded Abbeville — purchased 160 arpents from Joseph LeBlanc to establish a church, rectory, and cemetery. LeBlanc himself was buried here in 1854, and the oldest marked grave belongs to Eufemie Broussard, who died in 1852. The ground holds the earliest generations of the town's Catholic community.
Saint Mary Magdalen Church
Abbeville, LA
Four successive churches dedicated to Saint Mary Magdalen have stood on this Abbeville ground since Père Antoine Désiré Mégret bought the land from Joseph LeBlanc in 1843 — the same French priest who founded the town itself. The present church was raised in 1911 under the pastorate of Père Laforest. The continuity of the site marks more than a century and a half of Catholic worship in the heart of French Louisiana.
Église Ste. Marie Madeleine
Abbeville, LA
This marker, in the Cajun French still spoken in Acadiana, records that four churches dedicated to Sainte Marie Madeleine have stood in succession on land Père Antoine Désiré Mégret bought from Joseph LeBlanc in 1843. The present church was built in 1911 under Père Laforest. The French inscription is itself a testament to the living French Catholic culture of Abbeville.
Judge Émile Édouard (Edward) Simon, 1824 - 1914
St. Martinville, LA
A St. Martinville native, Émile Édouard Simon studied law at Harvard under the celebrated jurists Joseph Story and Simon Greenleaf, earning his degree in 1846, and went on to serve as 14th Judicial District Judge — the second of four generations of judges in his family. Family tradition holds that while both were at Harvard, Simon described the Acadian exiles' 1765 settlement of the Teche country to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who was then composing his epic poem Evangeline. The plaque honors him as a distinguished son of the Acadian community.