Pointe Coupee Parish's historic churches and the visitors they bring

Two churches in Pointe Coupee Parish are on the National Register of Historic Places: St. Francis Chapel near New Roads and St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church near Innis. What they show about local business is mostly indirect. They are old, they were built with local labor and money, and the parish tourism office promotes at least one of them to visitors.

St. Francis Chapel

The parish of St. Francis of Pointe Coupee dates to 1728, the National Park Service’s nomination says, making it the eighth Catholic parish established in what is now Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. The first church was dedicated on March 16, 1738. A second, built in 1760, was threatened by the Mississippi River in the 1890s. The nomination describes a community-wide effort to take it apart and rebuild it. Local carpenters won the contract to dismantle it in 1892.

The old timbers were too decayed to rebuild the church as it had been, so the community built a smaller one. It was dedicated on May 29, 1895, on a site donated by Jules Labatut. The building was moved again in the 1930s to make room for a new levee. The Park Service lists it as the oldest surviving church building in the New Roads area, a Gothic Revival design, and it joined the National Register on May 25, 1979. Architectural historian Karen Kingsley notes that the interior holds an eighteenth-century confessional. The nomination was prepared by the pastor of St. Mary’s Church in New Roads, and it names the congregation of St. Mary of False River as the chapel’s owner. St. Mary became its own parish in 1866.

St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church

St. Stephen’s was founded in 1848 by Anglican settlers. According to its nomination, a New York architect, J. A. Wills, drew up a Gothic Revival building. Ground was broken in 1850, the church was finished in 1858, and Bishop Leonidas Polk consecrated it on May 1, 1859. The nomination calls it the oldest brick church building in the parish and says enslaved workers made the bricks, doors and pews on site. The church joined the National Register on April 24, 1974. The parish tourism office lists it among its attractions.

Visitors and local spending

The state’s visitor figures do not break out churches. They do show the size of the visitor trade they sit in. The Louisiana Office of Tourism’s 2025 tables put direct visitor spending in Pointe Coupee Parish at $31.0 million: $10.0 million on food and beverage, $7.6 million on transportation, $4.6 million on retail, and $4.4 million each on lodging and recreation. That is 0.2 percent of the state’s total.

Tourism supports 112 direct jobs in the parish, or 164 counting indirect and induced ones, and about $2.4 million in direct state and local taxes. In March 2024 the Park Service also listed the New Roads Commercial Historic District, a stretch of downtown New Roads around Main and Court streets, on the National Register.