Natchitoches Parish, Louisiana
The Other Side of Louisiana’s Oldest Town
Founded in 1714, Natchitoches has had three centuries of churchyards, family
plots, and town cemeteries. Sixty historic and modern cemeteries are recorded here, along with the plantations, forts, and river houses that keep turning up in other
people’s stories.
The cemeteries
Sixty cemeteries, one parish
Some sit behind a church on a numbered highway. Some are four stones in a
soybean field with no road to them. All sixty are listed, mapped where coordinates exist,
and written up with what it actually takes to visit in daylight.
The landmarks
Houses that never quite emptied
Cane River runs thirty-five miles through plantation country, and almost every
bend of it has a building on the National Register and a story that does not appear on the
plaque. The directory begins with Magnolia, Melrose, the Kate Chopin House, and Fort
St. Jean Baptiste.