Roque House

The walls went up around 1790 — mud and moss packed between hand-hewn cypress posts, a building method called bousillage entre poteaux. The technique came from the Caribbean and was adapted here, in what was then a French settlement on the Red River, 76 years after Louis Juchereau de St. Denis established Natchitoches as a trading outpost with Spanish-controlled Mexico. French Catholic settlers and creoles had claimed land along the water and developed cotton plantations in the antebellum years. The Roque House is one of the oldest standing structures in the Natchitoches Historic Landmark District. When the Red River shifted course, it bypassed Natchitoches and cut off its lucrative connection to the Mississippi River, leaving a 33-mile oxbow lake in its place — now called Cane River Lake. In the 1960s, preservationists moved the Roque House to the riverbank to save it. It now stands on the Cane River lakefront near Front Street, part of the heritage trail. Exterior viewing only. Free. You're looking at walls built the way they were built before there was an American Louisiana — mud, moss, and cypress, still standing.