Let's start our picture tour of St. Martinville where the town itself started, with one of Louisiana's oldest Catholic churches, St. Martin de Tours Catholic Church. The St. Martin Catholic parish was started by French missionaries before 1755. Early life in St. Martinville, or Poste des Attakapas as it was called, was hard and often short for the first settlers. Life itself revolved around the Catholic church and the town grew around the church square. The first church structure was built in 1773. The present church structure was completed in 1844 (Photo 1a).

Upon entering the St. Martin de Tours Church, you are greated by a lifesize statue of St. Joan of Arc (Photo 2a). As you enter the main area, you are humbled by the many enormous columns supporting the roof which towers overhead (Photo 3a). Approaching the altar, you notice a relic of the past, a preacher's pulpit (Photo 4a) which is no longer used. To the left is a 1870s replica of The Lady Of Lourdes Grotto (Photo 5a) which is made of clay and Spanish moss. The altar (Photo 6a) has a large painting of St. Martin offering half his cape to a beggar. To the right of the altar is a large marble baptismal font (Photo 7a) which was a gift from King Louis XVI of France (1774-1792). Upon leaving, we are bid a fond farewell by the beautiful play of colors on the columns from the large stained glass windows (Photo 8a).

Now outside in the church square, we see the "Petit Paris Museum" (Photo 9a) which was built in 1861 as a school house. St. Martinville was nick-named "Le Petit Paris" or "Little Paris" by the aristocratic Frenchmen (Photo 10a) who fled the French Revolution in the late 1700s. Inside the museum, you will find a depiction of the legendary Durand sister's wedding created using Mardi Gras costumes (Photo 11a).

The Durand wedding legend states that for his daughter's double wedding in 1850, their wealthy father, Charles Durand, supposedly imported hundreds of spiders from Cathay to spin large spider webs in the three mile long Oak & Pine Alley (Photo 12a) which lead to the Durand Plantation House. On the morning of the wedding, Charles Durand had the spider webs, which were damp with morning dew, dusted with gold and silver dust. When the wedding guests and his daughters rode in carriages up the alley to the wedding party at the plantation house, they could admire the now gold and silver webs glistening in the morning sun. And when his newly wed daughters left to catch a steamboat to go to honeymoon in New Orleans, they once again were reminded of their father's love and wealth.

Back outside in the church square, we can view "The Presbytere" (Photo 13a) which was built in 1856 as the Catholic priest's home. We can also see La Maison Duchamp on the corner (Photo 14a) and the Duchamp Opera House across the street from it (Photo 15a).

As we walk down the street toward the Bayou Teche, we can see the Evangeline Oak Tree (Photo 16a) at the end of the street on the bayou banks. This legendary tree and the story of Evangeline (Photo 17a) is immortalized in Longfellow's famous poem, "Evangeline." The Acadian Memorial Museum (Photo 18a) is right down the street from the Evangeline Oak.

Across the Bayou Teche, the residents of St. Martinville find their final resting place in the St. Michael's Catholic Cemetery (Photo 19a), one of the oldest cemeteries in Louisiana. This cemetery contains many unusual tombs, such as the rare Table Tomb of Jean Francois Hilaire Caillet (1798-1837) (Photo 20a). There are only six of these marble "Table Tombs" known to exist in the State of Louisiana. A cemetery in Natchez, Mississippi contains many of these "Table Tombs".

This concludes our picture tour of St. Martinville. There are many more historic buildings and attractions to see in St. Martinville and along the banks of the Bayou Teche (Photo 21a). These treasures await you!

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