HistoricSiteMarkers

Historic Markers in Louisiana

107 markers in the database — showing 61–107.

Longue Vue House Local Landmark

New Orleans, LA · est. 1985

Longue Vue House is a grand country estate on the edge of New Orleans, built in the early 1940s for the Stern family and celebrated for its formal gardens and refined Classical-inspired architecture. In 1985 the city's Historic District Landmarks Commission formally recognized it, protecting the house and grounds as a treasured local landmark.

Longue Vue House National Historic Landmark

New Orleans, LA

Longue Vue House and Gardens, the Stern family's early-1940s estate, is among the last American country houses built in the grand tradition and set within meticulously designed gardens. Its designation as a National Historic Landmark places it in the small circle of sites judged to hold significance for the whole nation's story.

Longue Vue House National Register Plaque

New Orleans, LA · est. 1991

In 1991 Longue Vue House and Gardens was added to the National Register of Historic Places under the 1966 preservation act, a legal recognition of its architectural and cultural value. The listing reflects a wider mid-century American movement to protect distinctive homes and landscapes before they were lost.

Louis Bouligny

New Orleans, LA

This was the site of the plantation of Louis Bouligny (1781–1862), remembered as soldier, planter, and statesman. In 1834 the land was laid out as Faubourg Bouligny, a New Orleans suburb bounded by Upperline, General Taylor, Clara, and the river.

Louisiana State Bank Building

New Orleans, LA

This plaque records the 1983 National Historic Landmark designation of the Louisiana State Bank Building on Royal Street. Completed around 1821, it was the last work of Benjamin Henry Latrobe, one of the fathers of American architecture, who died of yellow fever in New Orleans before its completion.

Madame John's Legacy

New Orleans, LA

Known as 'Madame John's Legacy,' this French colonial home was built in 1788 for the Spanish army captain Don Manuel Lanzos, on a site occupied since about 1725. It was the birthplace of Renato Beluche (1781–1860), a Baratarian associate of Jean Lafitte who fought in the Battle of New Orleans and later became an admiral in the Venezuelan navy. The earlier house here belonged to Jean Pascal, a sailor killed in the 1729 Natchez uprising, and the property took its literary nickname from a George W. Cable story before passing to the Louisiana State Museum.

Madisonville

Madisonville, LA

First called "Cokie" for the shells heaped along its shores, this Tchefuncte-River town was renamed about 1811 to honor President James Madison. It hosted a U.S. Navy yard in the early 1800s, and tradition holds that Andrew Jackson paused here in November 1814 on his way to defend New Orleans. The settlement grew as a shipbuilding and maritime community on Lake Pontchartrain's north shore.

Madisonville Cemetery

Madisonville, LA

In use from 1800 to the present, Madisonville Cemetery holds pre-Louisiana Purchase colonial settlers alongside veterans of the War of 1812 and the Civil War, and many others of local and national note. Its graves span the transformation of the Gulf Coast from French and Spanish colonial ground into an American community. The Daughters of the American Colonists placed the marker in 2015.

Madisonville Civil War Earthworks

Madisonville, LA

After Union forces captured Madisonville, soldiers "on fatigue duty" dug these fortifications between January and March 1864 to guard the town against Confederate raids from the countryside. The line was a trench fronted by an abatis — a barrier of felled trees with sharpened points aimed outward — running westward across town. The Union held Madisonville to draw off its timber, lumber, turpentine, tar, and bricks for the Department of the Gulf.

Manila Village

Jean Lafitte, LA

Around the turn of the twentieth century, Filipino fishermen in nearby Barataria Bay built a community of houses and drying platforms on stilts above the water, known as Manila Village. Led by Quintin de la Cruz, its residents pioneered the sun-drying of shrimp that helped launch Louisiana's shrimp industry. The platform community endured for decades until Hurricane Betsy swept it away in 1965.

Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial

New Orleans, LA

This memorial in downtown New Orleans honors the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the Baptist minister who led the nonviolent civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. His campaigns for voting rights, desegregation, and economic justice reshaped the American South before his assassination in 1968.

Minden Male Academy

Minden, LA

In antebellum Louisiana, education was a private and hard-won thing, and the town of Minden invested early: the Minden Academy was established in 1838, and by 1850 it had split into two schools, one of them the Minden Male Academy. Civic leader W.A. Drake donated both the land and the funds to build it, a common pattern in which a community's ambitions rested on the generosity of a few prominent citizens. Academy Park today preserves the ground where young men of the parish once received their classical schooling.

Molly Marine

New Orleans, LA

Molly Marine was dedicated on November 10, 1943 — the Marine Corps birthday — in the heart of New Orleans, honoring the women who joined the Marine Corps Women's Reserve during World War II under the recruiting call "Free a Marine to Fight." Believed to be among the first monuments to a woman in U.S. military uniform, she stands trim in her service dress as thousands of women stepped into stateside duties so male Marines could deploy.

Monument to the Immigrant

New Orleans, LA

Standing on the New Orleans riverfront, the Monument to the Immigrant honors the generations who arrived by ship at this Mississippi port — one of the nation's great gateways — seeking freedom and opportunity in a new land. New Orleans drew Irish, German, Italian, and many other newcomers whose labor and cultures reshaped the American South.

Mt. Carmel Academy

New Iberia, LA

Founded in 1872 by the Sisters of Mt. Carmel, this New Iberia academy offered formal education to girls at a time when such opportunities were scarce. The teaching order itself traced its origins to Tours, France, in 1825, and the oldest building on the grounds — nearest Bayou Teche — was raised by Henry F. Duperier in 1826. The school reflects the strong French Catholic educational tradition that took root along the Teche.

New Orleans

New Orleans, LA

The site was first noted in 1699 by the brothers Bienville and Iberville as a Native American portage linking the Mississippi to Lake Pontchartrain and the Gulf. Bienville founded the city in 1718 and named it for the Duke of Orleans, then Regent of France. Its curve along the Mississippi earned it the nickname the Crescent City.

Nicholas Roosevelt (inventor) and New Orleans (steamboat)

New Orleans, LA

On January 10, 1812, the steamboat New Orleans, commanded by Nicholas Roosevelt, completed the first successful steam-powered voyage down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers and tied up at this spot. The passage proved that boats could travel upstream against the current, transforming inland commerce. New Orleans would grow into one of the world's great ports on the strength of the steamboat trade.

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.

Olivier Plantation Store

Iberia Parish, LA

In the sugar country of Iberia Parish, along Bayou Teche in south Louisiana, the plantation store was the commercial heart of an agricultural estate. Bearing the Olivier name—a family long tied to the Attakapas region's French and Creole planter society—this store would have supplied field workers, tenants, and neighbors with goods, often on credit against the coming harvest. Such stores outlasted slavery, carrying the sharecropping and tenant economy of the sugar belt deep into the modern era.

Our Lady of the Lake Catholic Church

Mandeville, LA

Founded around 1850 on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain, Our Lady of the Lake Catholic Church took root as Mandeville grew into a lakeside resort and steamboat destination for New Orleanians. A parish of this age anchored the social and spiritual life of its community through the antebellum era and beyond. The marker records its long presence in St. Tammany Parish.

Our Lady of the Lake Church

Mandeville, LA

Catholic missionaries reached the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain early in the eighteenth century, evangelizing the Choctaw, Chinchuba, and other peoples; among the pioneers was Fr. Michael Baudouin, superior of Louisiana's Jesuit mission. A resident congregation was organized at Mandeville in 1850, and the missionary-poet Adrien Rouquette, 'Chahta-Ima,' also labored here. The present Our Lady of the Lake church was dedicated in 1953 under Benedictine care.

Place de Henriette Delille

New Orleans, LA

This spot in New Orleans honors Henriette Delille, a free woman of color born in the city's Creole community in the early 19th century. In 1842 she founded the Sisters of the Holy Family, a Catholic order of Black women who taught, nursed, and cared for the enslaved and elderly at a time when such work by African Americans was fiercely constrained. Her cause for sainthood has since made her one of the most celebrated figures of Afro-Creole New Orleans.

Ponchatoula Depot

Ponchatoula, LA

Ponchatoula's first depot went up about 1854 for the New Orleans, Jackson & Great Northern Railroad, later part of the Illinois Central. Union forces burned it when they captured the town in March 1863, and it was rebuilt around 1865. The present depot dates to 1894, remodeled in the 1920s, and was placed by the state tourism department in 1982.

Pottery Hill

Mandeville, LA

Pottery Hill, shaded by the ancient Castain Oak, holds layered evidence of human life reaching back to the late Tchefuncte era around 800 BC and the early Marksville period of the first centuries AD. Pottery shards, bone, and shell deposits show that Native peoples — including the Acolapissa and later the Choctaw — used this ground continuously into the 20th century. Colonial settlers later prized its fine clay, running commercial potteries here until the 1940s.

Republic of West Florida

St. Tammany Parish, LA

St. Tammany Parish lay within the Spanish-governed West Florida parishes and was not part of the 1803 Louisiana Purchase. In September 1810 residents revolted against Spanish rule and declared the Republic of West Florida, raising their own flag and electing a president. The republic lasted just 74 days before the United States annexed the territory by force in December 1810.

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.

Saint Peter Church

Covington, LA

St. Peter parish traces its roots to a chapel the Abbé Jouanneault built on the Bogue Falaya in 1843, with Father J. X. Giraud becoming the first resident pastor in 1863 to serve a scattering of Louisiana communities. Over the following century the congregation raised new churches — a Massachusetts Street sanctuary in 1898 and the Jefferson Avenue church in 1940 — while Benedictine monks came to serve the parish, continuously so since 1922. The marker records the long life of a Catholic community founded by French and European clergy.

Saint Stephen Church

New Orleans, LA

Founded in 1849 by Fr. Angelo Gandolfo, this parish first met in private homes of Faubourg Bouligny before dedicating a chapel and then, as it grew, a larger church. The present Gothic-style St. Stephen's was begun in 1868 amid Reconstruction's civil unrest and economic hardship, delaying its completion until the late 1880s, with a 200-foot steeple blessed in 1906.

Salem United Church of Christ

New Orleans, LA

Founded on March 8, 1863, as the first German Evangelical Lutheran Church of Jefferson City, this congregation served the German-speaking immigrants of a suburb later absorbed into New Orleans. It dedicated its first building in 1866 and the present church in 1906, and it preached in German until English services began in 1895. The parish, now Salem United Church of Christ, marked its 125th anniversary in 1988.

Site of the First U.S. District Court

New Orleans, LA

This corner holds layers of New Orleans's legal and civic past. A Spanish colonial boys' public school stood here from 1792, and after the Louisiana Purchase the building became the first United States District Court for the Louisiana Territory. In 1815, in a famous clash between military and civil authority, General Andrew Jackson was fined $1,000 for contempt after refusing to lift martial law until news of peace was confirmed following the Battle of New Orleans.

South’s Defenders Memorial Monument

Lake Charles, LA

This is one of the South's many Confederate memorials, raised generations after the Civil War during the era when Lost Cause organizations erected monuments to Confederate soldiers across the region. Standing in Lake Charles, the 'South's Defenders' monument honored those who fought for the Confederacy. In 2020 Hurricane Laura's winds toppled the statue from its perch, leaving the column and plinth behind — a reminder of how weather, time, and public debate have reshaped these contested landmarks.

Spanish Custom House

New Orleans, LA

For nearly four decades in the late 1700s, Louisiana was a Spanish colony, and New Orleans served as capital of the Province of Luisiana after France ceded the territory in 1762. This custom house on Moss Street, dating to 1784, recalls the era when Spanish officials collected duties on the goods and shipping that flowed through the busy Gulf port. The city's Spanish decades left lasting marks on its architecture, law, and street names before Louisiana passed back to France and then to the United States in 1803.

St. Bernard's Catholic Church

Breaux Bridge, LA

Catholic worship in Breaux Bridge began with a small chapel in 1841, and by 1847 St. Bernard's Parish was formally established, its first substantial church rising a decade later. The present twin-steepled church, built in 1933–34 by local craftsmen from bricks fired in the community's own factory, crowned the ministry of Rev. P.A. Borel. Its French-Romanesque lines make it a landmark of Louisiana's Acadian heartland.

St. Louis Hotel & Slave Exchange

New Orleans, LA

The luxurious St. Louis Hotel operated here from 1838 to 1862, its domed rotunda ringed by a bank, ballroom, and trading exchange. Beneath that same dome, auctioneers sold land, goods, and thousands of enslaved men, women, and children — making this elegant space one of the largest slave markets in the antebellum South.

St. Patrick's Church

New Orleans, LA

Established in 1833 and completed in 1840, St. Patrick's is the oldest parish church outside the French Quarter, built to serve New Orleans's English-speaking Catholics apart from the older Creole parishes. In 1850 it briefly served as pro-cathedral while St. Louis Cathedral was rebuilt, and here in 1851 Antoine Blanc received the pallium as the first Archbishop of New Orleans.

St. Patrick's Church National Landmark

New Orleans, LA

This plaque records the 1975 designation of St. Patrick's Church as a National Historic Landmark, recognizing its national significance in American history. Completed in 1840, the Gothic Revival church is one of New Orleans's architectural treasures and the oldest parish church outside the French Quarter.

Tara — Gone with the Wind House

New Orleans, LA

This uptown corner sits in Hurstville, laid out by Cornelius Hurst in 1832 as the first of New Orleans' uptown faubourgs, or suburbs, as the young American city pushed upriver from its Creole core. In 1941 businessman George J. Palmer and his wife Juliette built their family home here as a loving replica of Tara, the plantation house from the 1939 film "Gone with the Wind" — a striking example of how a Hollywood image of the Old South shaped real Southern architecture. The site had already seen an 1894 residence and, later, a colorful chapter under Jackson Brewing Company president Lawrence Fabacher, who added a casino, greenhouses, and a stable before it was all cleared in 1940.

Tennessee Williams

New Orleans, LA · est. 1998

Built in 1842 in New Orleans' French Quarter, the Avart-Peretti House passed through Creole owners and later served as the studio of the painter Achille Peretti. In 1946 and 1947 the playwright Tennessee Williams lodged here and wrote 'A Streetcar Named Desire,' drawing on the very streets and streetcar lines outside his window. The play's steamy, decaying New Orleans owes much to this address.

The Hedgewood

New Orleans, LA

The Hedgewood is an imposing Colonial Revival house built in 1894 for cotton broker Charles Miltenberger by Chicago builder Thomas Nicholson, who also raised Tulane's Gibson Hall and the St. Charles Hotel that same year. Enlarged in 1907, it later spent thirty-three years as a hotel before its more recent reinvention.

The Presbytère

New Orleans, LA

Designed in 1791 by architect Gilberto Guillemard as a rectory for the Church of St. Louis, the Presbytère rose only through the generosity of Don Andrés Almonester y Roxas and stalled at one story when he died in 1798. Finished by the cathedral wardens in 1813, it was never used as a rectory; instead it served as a courthouse and, from 1911, as part of the Louisiana State Museum.

Thomas House

New Orleans, LA

Built in 1827 for Dr. Pierre Thomas, this Federal-style townhouse reflects the elegant urban architecture of early New Orleans. Remodeled in 1844 and later sold in 1867 to Jean Schweitzer, who ran a book and stationery shop here, it carries the layered story of a single address across the 19th century, down to its graceful cast-iron balcony.

Town of Carrollton

New Orleans, LA

Surveyor Charles Zimpel laid out Carrollton in 1833 on the former Macarty Plantation, land that had once been the uppermost portion of Bienville's 1719 French grant. The town served as the seat of Jefferson Parish from 1852 to 1874, when it was annexed by a growing New Orleans. Its 1854 courthouse was designed by the noted architect Henry Howard.

United States Custom House

New Orleans, LA

The United States Custom House on Canal Street is one of New Orleans's great public buildings, a massive granite structure begun in the mid-nineteenth century to handle the customs of one of America's busiest ports. Its construction stretched across decades and the Civil War, during which the unfinished building served federal purposes. This plaque records its designation as a National Historic Landmark of national significance.

UpStairs Lounge Arson Memorial Plaque

New Orleans, LA

On June 24, 1973, a flash fire tore through the UpStairs Lounge, a second-floor bar in New Orleans' French Quarter that served as a gathering place for the city's gay community, killing thirty-two people in what was then the deadliest fire in the city's history. In the era's climate, many victims went unclaimed and some churches refused funerals, and the tragedy was met with public indifference or scorn. That silence, and the grief it failed to honor, helped galvanize an emerging movement for LGBT dignity and rights.

Veterans of Foreign War Plaque

Minden, LA

This plaque honors the men and women of Minden who served in America's overseas conflicts, the kind of community remembrance that Veterans of Foreign Wars posts have placed in town squares across the country. Without naming a single battle, it speaks for generations who left small Louisiana towns for distant fronts across the twentieth century. Such memorials gave communities a shared place to grieve and give thanks.

Walker Percy

Covington, LA

Novelist Walker Percy (1916–1990) made his home in Covington, where he wrote much of his acclaimed fiction, including Lancelot, The Second Coming, Love in the Ruins, The Thanatos Syndrome, The Last Gentleman, and The Moviegoer, winner of the National Book Award. A co-founder of the Fellowship of Southern Writers and a University of North Carolina graduate, he explored faith, alienation, and the modern South. He is buried at nearby St. Joseph Abbey.

White supremacy monument

Colfax, LA

This monument commemorates the white participants in the Colfax Massacre of 1873, when a white militia attacked and killed a large number of Black freedmen defending the Grant Parish courthouse during a disputed Reconstruction election. It was among the deadliest acts of racial violence in the Reconstruction era, and the Supreme Court case that grew from it, United States v. Cruikshank, gutted federal power to protect Black citizens' rights. The marker's own language — honoring men who fell 'fighting for white supremacy' — makes plain the Lost Cause worldview that later erected it.