St. Matthew High School

St. Matthew High School sits on Isle Brevelle, the stretch of Cane River bottomland where descendants of Marie Thérèse Coincoin and the gens de couleur libres families held land and continuity when most of Black Louisiana had neither. The school served that community—free people of color whose roots ran back to the 1700s—operating as a Catholic high school through the segregation era, when formal education for Black students in rural Louisiana was scarce and often nonexistent. The building is at 2552 LA 119, near Melrose Plantation, in a landscape dense with what was built and what survived. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2005. The school is now vacant, but the fact of it stands: proof that a community with deep claim to place built the institutions it needed and kept them running.