The Kate Chopin House

The house at Cloutierville was built between 1806 and 1813 by the town's founder — handmade brick, cypress boards, bousillage walls, a galleried front — and it was one of the finest examples of Creole-colonial domestic architecture in north Louisiana. From 1879 to 1884 it was Kate Chopin's home. She had moved from St. Louis with her husband Oscar and their five children after his cotton business failed, and she spent five years watching a world — French-speaking, Catholic, half Cajun, half Creole of color — that she would later render in *Bayou Folk*, *A Night in Acadie*, and *The Awakening*.

The house became a museum in 1979 and a National Historic Landmark in 1993. On October 1, 2008, it burned to the ground. Electrical fire. The National Park Service delisted the site in 2015. Nothing stands today at the address but a cleared lot. The HABS photographs, taken before the fire, are the best remaining record of a building that two centuries of hurricanes, Civil War, and Cane River floods had spared until forty years ago.