Maison de Marie Thérèse

The cottage stands where Marie Thérèse Coincoin's farmstead occupied river-bottom land along Cane River — the same alluvial tract the Spanish Crown conceded in January 1787 and patented in May 1794. Coincoin had been born enslaved in 1742 at the Natchitoches post founded by Louis Juchereau de St. Denis. In 1778, Claude Thomas Pierre Métoyer purchased and manumitted her. Together they had ten children. As the mixed-race children matured and married, Métoyer manumitted the eldest five of those he had held in slavery. After her manumission, Coincoin planted tobacco, trapped wild bears and turkeys for the market, manufactured medicine, and shipped pelts and bear oil downriver to New Orleans. The 67-acre farmstead on the Grand Coast of Red River gave her a stake; after the Crown patent, she applied for 800 additional arpents of piney woods to the west and hired a Spaniard to operate a vacherie there. In 1807 she bought a third tract of developed farmland adjacent to her homestead. She lived frugally and invested her income in purchasing freedom for the children from an earlier relationship. By her death in 1816, she had manumitted three of those children and three grandchildren. Another daughter and many grandchildren remained enslaved, as their owners refused to manumit or sell them. The cottage's bousillage walls — mud-and-moss infill between half-timber framing — use the construction method common to French Creole buildings in colonial Louisiana. It sits on Isle Brevelle, the historical center of the Cane River community of gens de couleur libres that Coincoin's family established. Her eldest son Augustin donated land for a church there; in 1829 he commissioned his brother Louis to build St. Augustine Parish Church, believed to be the first church in the United States built by free people of color for their own use. The cottage was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1979. It remains private property — exterior viewing from the road only.