A Poetic Place

At Evangeline Oak Park in St. Martinville, a bust of Longfellow rises beside the oak tree named after his famous heroine.

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” writes Joan Didion in her essay collection “The White Album.” Since 1847, many in South Louisiana have clung to a story that began with an anecdote at a dinner party and became one of the state’s foundational myths.

In 1840, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow — novelist, travel writer, and the most popular American poet of his era — heard a secondhand account of the separation and journey of two young lovers whom the British expelled from Acadia nearly a century before. For several years, Longfellow filed that story away while he completed other work. Then in 1845, the author whose work includes “Paul Revere’s Ride” and “The Song of Hiawatha” started drafting his tale of longing and desire set against the backdrop of Acadian exile. “I know not what name to give it — not my new baby, but my new poem,” he wrote in his diary. “Shall it be Gabriel, or Celestine, or Evangeline?”

Longfellow chose the latter title for his 1847 epic poem. “The great success of ‘Evangeline” launched tourism in Louisiana,” says Jolene Adam, an interpretive ranger at the Longfellow-Evangeline State Historic Site in St. Martinville. In what Longfellow called “the legend of a girl who, in the dispersion of the Acadians was separated from her lover, and passed her life in waiting and seeking for him, and only finding him dying in a hospital when both were old,” soldiers on both sides of the Civil War sought solace, carrying the poem into battle. “Sorrow and silence are strong,” Longfellow writes in “Evangeline, “and patient endurance is godlike. / Therefore accomplish thy labor of love, till the heart is made godlike,  / Purified, strengthened, perfected, and rendered more worthy of heaven!”

At Longfellow-Evangeline State Historic Site, Maison Olivier, the Creole plantation built circa 1815, features a mix of French, Creole and Caribbean architectural influences.

Today, the poem’s legacy lingers among international readers. On Acadian.org, Naomi Griffiths reports that in its first 100 years, “Evangeline” went through 270 editions and 130 translations. Adam says, “At least once a week, visitors arrive from all over the world quoting the poem.”

The Longfellow-Evangeline State Historic Site is one of two locations in St. Martinville devoted to “Evangeline.” Its New England-born author never travelled to Louisiana, but as Adam says, “He did his research.” Most importantly, Longfellow informed readers around the world about the expulsion of Acadians and their journey to Louisiana, using his imagination to unearth the kind of “story-truth” that novelist Tim O’Brien deems “truer sometimes than happening-truth.”

The Gabriel Oak at the historic site provides a grander canopy than the Evangeline Oak.

In 1934, the Longfellow-Evangeline State Historic Site became Louisiana’s first state park. It includes a reproduction of an Acadian farmstead and 11 oaks that are more than 100 years old, most notably the one named for Gabriel. Since 1996, Adam has directed local and international visitors through the vibrantly painted Creole property that, beginning in the early 1800s, served as a cattle ranch and later produced indigo, cotton and sugarcane

Many visitors arrive with at least some knowledge of Longfellow’s poem, Adam says, and at least once a week, someone comes looking for the oak named after Evangeline. To see that tree, “undoubtedly the most famous oak in Louisiana,” as William Guion writes in “100 Oaks Project,” Adam points visitors to Evangeline Oak Park, a five-minute drive from the historic site.

There, Emmeline Labiche and Louis Arceneaux, the “counterparts of Evangeline and Gabriel,” as the historic marker notes, finally reunited — or so legend has it. In 1907, Felix Voorhies published that version in “Acadian Reminiscences,” in which the lovers reunite under the Evangeline Oak. Two decades later, Hollywood arrived in St. Martinville to adapt Longfellow’s poem, and in 1929 moviegoers watched Dolores del Río star in the title role. Del Río modeled for the statue of Evangeline that she donated to the city and which stands outside St. Martin de Tours Catholic Church, “Mother Church of the Acadians.” The statue’s plaque deems Evangeline “the prototype of the Acadian maiden.”

As the French philosopher Simone Weil writes in “Gravity and Grace,” “Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life.” In London or Naples or Pointe Coupee Parish, our experiences deepen when we ponder the worlds that Charles Dickens, Elena Ferrante or Ernest J. Gaines created. Such work provides ways for us to understand ourselves and our relationship to a specific place. It also helps us explain our place to others.

Location
St. Martin Parish

Did you know?
The St. Martinville Garden Club has created historical markers for visitors who stroll through the city’s downtown. This “Walk with Evangeline” begins with the establishment of French presence in the New World in 1604 and ends with information about Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1847 epic poem, “Evangeline.” “From 1764 to 1789 about 3,000 exiled Acadians traveled by ship to live in Louisiana, some taking as long as six months and arriving in the same clothes they were deported in,” one marker informs visitors. “Louisiana was then a colony of Spain, but the Acadians managed to retain their French culture. Their descedants, the Cajuns, continued to keep their language and lifestyles. This culture is alive and well today and over 500,000 descendants can be found in the parishes of Louisiana which make up Acadiana.”