Judge Émile Édouard (Edward) Simon, 1824 - 1914
St. Martinville, Saint Martin Parish, Louisiana
Marker Inscription
Judge Émile Édouard (Edward) Simon, 1824 - 1914. A native of St. Martinville, Simon studied law at Harvard under the Honorable Joseph Story and Simon Greenleaf, earning his degree in 1846. As 14th Judicial District Judge from 1853 to 1865, Simon was to become the second of four generations of judges. While Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was writing the epic poem Evangeline and teaching at Harvard, Simon was a student there. Family tradition holds that Simon told Longfellow about the establishment of Acadian exiles here in 1765 and described for him the geography and local color of the Teche country. May this plaque forever honor our distinguished native son!
Erected by City of St. Martinville
The Story
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.
Why it matters
Simon links a small Louisiana town to both the nation's legal traditions and one of America's most beloved poems about the Acadian diaspora.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In the middle of the nineteenth century, St. Martinville sat at the heart of what Louisianans call the Teche country—a slow-moving bayou land settled generations earlier by Acadian exiles, French Creoles, and their neighbors. By the 1820s, when Émile Édouard Simon was born here, this was a prosperous, deeply French-speaking corner of a young American state, its culture rooted in a homeland far to the north that most of its people had never seen.
Louisiana had only joined the Union in 1812, and its legal world was unusual: French and Spanish traditions still shaped daily life, even as American courts and American law took hold. A young man of ambition from St. Martinville who wanted to master the law faced a real choice—stay within the familiar Creole world, or go north to study in the new nation's leading schools.
Simon's long life, from 1824 to 1914, spanned an astonishing sweep of American history: the confident years of the early republic, the rupture of the Civil War, and the slow rebuilding that followed. His years on the bench, from 1853 to 1865, ended in the very season the war did.
People & events
Simon left the bayou for Cambridge, Massachusetts, and studied law at Harvard, earning his degree in 1846. His teachers were not minor figures. Joseph Story sat on the United States Supreme Court while helping to build Harvard Law School, and Simon Greenleaf was among the most influential legal scholars of the age. To study under them was to sit at the source of American legal thought.
Returning home, Simon took his place in a remarkable family line—by the marker's account, the second of four generations to serve as judges. From 1853 to 1865 he served as judge of the 14th Judicial District, carrying the discipline of his Harvard training back to the Teche country that had raised him.
There is one more story attached to his name, and the marker is careful to call it what it is: family tradition. While Simon was a student at Harvard, the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was teaching there and composing Evangeline, his epic about the Acadian exile. Tradition holds that the young Louisianan told Longfellow about the Acadians who had settled here in 1765 and painted for him the geography and color of the Teche. Whether or not the poet drew on those conversations, the tale captures something true—that a son of St. Martinville carried his homeland's memory into the rooms where American letters were being made.
Its place in the American story
Longfellow's Evangeline, published in 1847, did more than any history book to fix the Acadian story in the American imagination. It told the nation of a people expelled from their homes and scattered across a continent, and it turned a French-speaking Louisiana bayou into a place of national longing and romance. For countless readers, the Teche country became sacred ground because a poem had made it so.
Simon's life ties that literary legend to something equally American: the making of a national legal profession. The classroom of Story and Greenleaf helped standardize how law was taught and practiced across a growing country, and their students carried that learning into every corner of it—including a district courthouse deep in Acadiana.
So this modest memorial marks a genuine crossing point. Here, in one man's biography, the young republic's legal traditions meet its most beloved poem of exile and belonging. A small Louisiana town turns out to be quietly stitched into both the story of American law and the story of how Americans learned to feel about their own past.
If you visit
St. Martinville rewards slow travel. This is a town to walk rather than rush—look for the memorial honoring Judge Simon as a distinguished native son, and read it as a doorway into two intertwined stories: a local family of judges, and the poem that made this bayou famous.
The surrounding Teche country is the real setting of the tale. Follow the slow green water of Bayou Teche, notice the deep French roots that still shape the town's names and rhythms, and remember that the Acadian settlement the marker mentions—1765—is what drew a poet's imagination here in the first place.
This is a fine stop on a road trip through Acadiana, whether you are chasing Cajun history, literary landmarks, or simply the feel of a place where the past sits close to the surface. Come with Evangeline in mind, and let a single roadside memorial connect a Harvard classroom, a national poem, and the quiet bayou town that gave rise to both.
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
- · Émile Édouard Simon
- · Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
- · Joseph Story
- · Simon Greenleaf
Themes & tags
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