Trinity Episcopal Church

The oldest Episcopal church in northwest Louisiana opened for worship in 1857, the same year the city began building the Minor Basilica of the Immaculate Conception — Protestant and Catholic raising their roofs at once in a parish seat founded as a French Catholic trading post in 1714. The congregation was American, not French creole. Natchitoches had been French Louisiana until 1803; after the Louisiana Purchase, migration increased from the United States, and the Americans who came were primarily of English and Scots-Irish ancestry and of Protestant faith. The building is Gothic Revival — a simple steeple and original interior woodwork. In 1989, it stood in for a small-town Southern sanctuary when the wedding scene in *Steel Magnolias* was filmed here. A generation has seen the interior on screen. Still an active parish. Visitors are welcome outside service hours. The church sits in the Historic District, where preservation work beginning in the 1970s turned nearly intact antebellum architecture into the foundation of the city's revival.