Louis Juchereau de St. Denis Statue

A bronze figure stands on Front Street where El Camino Real — the Spanish royal road from Mexico City — reaches its northern end. The sculptor Larry Crowder, working from Fort Worth, cast the memorial to Louis Juchereau de St. Denis, the man who established Natchitoches in 1714. St. Denis was a Canadien explorer. The settlement he founded became the oldest permanent European community in the land that would later be acquired through the Louisiana Purchase. He built the outpost as a French trading post on the Red River near a village of Natchitoches Indians, after whom the city took its name. The statue marks a historic bond between Quebec, Louisiana, and Texas — three places that shaped the colonial geography St. Denis moved through. It stands along the Cane River side of bricked Front Street in the Historic District, where visitors can see the waterway that connected French settlers to the Red River trade network before the river changed course and left Natchitoches beside an oxbow lake. St. Denis lived from 1674 to 1744. The memorial anchors a stretch of riverfront that still carries the outline of the eighteenth-century town he planted here.