The Wall of Names lists approximately 3000 persons identified as Acadian refugees in early Louisiana records. Their names are engraved on twelve bronze plaques and framed in granite. A guide to the names is available for purchase at the Memorial or in our online store.

Visitors of Acadian descent are encouraged to use the wall, or our online database, Ensemble Encore, as a starting point for genealogical research. We hope these resources will reunite many Acadian families.

An inscription on the Wall reads in both English and French, "Pause friend, read my name and remember..."

See Preface to the booklet The Wall of Names at the Acadian Memorial in English and French:

Preface

Many people come to the Acadian Memorial in St. Martinville, Louisiana, and ask about Evangeline and Gabriel.  They ask because these names have been so synonymous with the word “Acadian” that some visitors expect the memorial to be about them.  It is not.  However, it can be said that those names are part of the raison d’être, the reason, for an Acadian Memorial.  For many years Evangeline, heroine of Longfellow’s poem by the same name, was an icon for persons of Acadian descent both in Canada and in Louisiana.  Dr. Carl A. Brasseaux, a leading Acadian/Cajun scholar explains that Cajuns of the early twentieth century, saw Longfellow’s heroine as a positive role model, the only Acadian revered by the otherwise ethnically intolerant English –speaking world into which they were seeking acceptance. With the flood of scholarly writings about Acadians since the mid-1970’s and the emergence of their history as a long and complex story, Acadians need no longer look to a literary character as their hero.  Their history can be told with real names, and about real people, as supreme survivors who opened new frontiers in Louisiana with an efficiency and adaptability so remarkable as to inspire the Acadian Memorial.

The Wall of Names is testament to their existence – lest we forget.

Jane G. Buillard
St. Martinville, Louisiana

A guide to the names is available for purchase at the Memorial and in our online store.

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