297. St. Martinville, Saint Martin Parish (LA41)

Remember what I was saying a few days ago about all the lovely courthouses out here? Well, welcome to another one of them. This particular town holds a special place in Louisiana. Beginning in the 1750’s, French Acadians, kicked out of Canada, began making their way to the area and settling. Thanks to linguistic drift, “Acadian” became “Cadien” became “Cajun,” and Saint Martin Parish became the birthplace of Cajun culture. Unsurprisingly, they also have a huge admiration for Henry Wadsworth Longfellow because of his poem Evangeline, which immortalized the plight of the Acadian Diaspora. While I understand both the popularity of the poem and its importance in the literary canon, thanks to years of studying Greek and Latin, I have a mild distaste for anything written in dactylic any-meter.

Speaking of that Longfellow guy, as fate would have it, there’s a state park called the Longfellow-Evangeline State Historic Site. I caught the place right before closing and took a look inside. Why does that matter? Because the cache was inside, not under the steps as I originally thought. I told the nice lady at the front why I was there, as the cache description mentioned, and she let me look around. After a few quick minutes, I found a box on the mantle that looked like it might be a cache and it was! So I did my work, even dropping in a trackable, and then slipped away so the nice lady could close up shop.