St. Martin de Tours Churchyard — The Mother Church

Five flags fly from the Presbytère next door — France, Spain, England, the Republic of West Florida, the United States — and that sequence is the whole story in shorthand. This ground has been claimed five times over. The dead in the churchyard remember every one.

St. Martin de Tours was founded in 1765, when Acadian exiles arrived here after the British expelled them from Canada. They built a parish in what would become the heart of Cajun Country, and it held. The present building was completed in 1840 — the third oldest church in Louisiana — but the community it serves is older than the building, older than the state, older than the country that eventually claimed this land as its own. The burials in the churchyard run the full span: French colonial through American, families who came with nothing and did not leave.

A grave marker for Emmeline Labiche stands in the churchyard, though local record suggests her remains were exhumed and reinterred elsewhere in the 20th century — the stone remains as a place of pilgrimage even if the burial itself has moved. Local tradition holds, and has held since the 19th century, that she was the real woman behind the Evangeline story — the flesh behind the legend, the exile behind the poem. Pilgrims have been coming to this grave for well over a hundred years. Whether the tradition survives scrutiny or not, that kind of sustained pilgrimage makes its own argument. You stand over someone who was real, inside a story that may or may not have been hers, and the ground does not resolve the question for you. That is what the place offers: not certainty, but proximity.

The church is open daily. The churchyard is accessible. Come for the flags if you need a reason, stay for what it means that they all came down and the graves did not.