Old Catholic Cemetery
Abbeville, Vermilion Parish, Louisiana
Marker Inscription
Old Catholic Cemetery. On July 25, 1843 Père Antoine Désiré Mégret purchased 160 arpents from Joseph LeBlanc for a church, rectory, and cemetery. Joseph LeBlanc was buried here in 1854. The oldest marked grave is of Eufemie Broussard 1852.
Erected by Jean Lafitte Historic Park and Preserve
The Story
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.
Why it matters
This cemetery is among the founding sites of Abbeville, preserving the first chapter of French Catholic settlement in Vermilion Parish.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In the 1840s, the prairies and bayous of what is now Vermilion Parish were still a young frontier of American Louisiana. The United States had held the territory for only about four decades, and much of southwest Louisiana remained sparsely settled ranch and rice country, worked by Acadian and Creole families whose roots ran back to the French colonial world.
Into this landscape came French missionary priests, sent to serve scattered Catholic families who often lived far from any church. A parish, in this world, was not just a congregation but the center of a whole community's life — the place where births, marriages, and deaths were recorded, and where a settlement first took shape.
Abbeville was born from exactly this impulse. When land was set aside here in the early 1840s for a church, a rectory, and a burial ground, it was the seed of a town rather than an addition to one. The cemetery you find today is a survivor of that founding moment.
People & events
On July 25, 1843, the French priest Père Antoine Désiré Mégret purchased 160 arpents of land from Joseph LeBlanc. The purchase had a clear purpose: to raise a church, a rectory for the priest, and a cemetery for the faithful. From that single transaction, the community of Abbeville grew.
The men and women tied to this ground are not distant abstractions. Joseph LeBlanc, who sold the land, was himself buried here in 1854 — the seller of the founding tract resting in the very cemetery his sale made possible.
The oldest marked grave belongs to Eufemie Broussard, who died in 1852. Her stone is the earliest surviving marker in the ground, a quiet reminder that a cemetery often outlasts every other trace of a community's first years. These are among the first names in Abbeville's story, set down in stone before much else here was.
Its place in the American story
The founding of a town around a priest's land purchase is a distinctly American Catholic story, and a distinctly Louisiana one. Across the young republic, immigrant faith communities — French, Irish, German, and others — planted churches that anchored new settlements and preserved the language and customs of the old country.
In south Louisiana, that immigrant Catholic culture became something enduring: the French-speaking, Catholic heartland whose descendants shaped the region's food, music, and identity. A cemetery like this one is a primary document of that heritage, holding the earliest generations who carried it forward.
It is also a reminder of how faith organized frontier life. Long before courthouses and commerce, it was often the parish that first gathered scattered families into a town. Standing here, you are standing at one of those beginnings.
If you visit
Come to this old cemetery expecting quiet. It is a place for slow walking and close looking, not for spectacle. Let your eyes move over the oldest stones, worn by more than a century and a half of Gulf Coast weather.
Seek out the earliest markers and notice the dates from the 1850s — this ground was already receiving Abbeville's dead while the town itself was barely begun. Read the names carefully; many are the French and Acadian surnames still common in the parish today.
If you're building a road trip through Cajun country, this is a fitting first or last stop — a place that quietly explains where a town came from before you go looking for what it became. Treat it as the sacred, still ground that it is, and let it set the tone for the rest of your day in Vermilion Parish.
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
Ancien Cimetiere Catholique
Abbeville, LA
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.
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.
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.
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.