Cajun Heritage Museum The story of the Bayou Cajuns, a people unlike any other, is a living history told by the Cajun Heritage Museum. A raised Cajun cottage, the Braud home was built in the mid-1800s, half a century after the Acadians were forced to leave their homes and farms in Nova Scotia's land of Acadie.

In the late 1700s, the Braud, Hebert and Landry families left their boats on the Mississippi River and settled in the Spanish Lake Basin. These French Cajun Catholics adapted to life in the swamps, hunting and fishing to subsist and building cypress homes raised up off the ground for ventilation and flood protection.

The Braud home, moved to Alligator Bayou in 1995 to become our museum, features a high-pitched roof that allows rain to run off quickly and a large front porch on which the family rested and talked after a long, hard day in their fields.

Originally located on the high ridges of Bluff Road above the bayous and swamps of the basin, the Braud home has a large attic in which several people slept, a small downstairs bedroom, a kitchen, and a formal parlor used only to receive the visiting priest or archbishop.

The Braud home, with its authentic family furnishings, contains the story of a unique branch of Acadians who slept on moss and corn shuck mattresses, slow-cooked their jambalaya and gumbo on a wood stove, and treated the swamp like the stained-glass cathedral that it is.

Visiting this authentic old cypress home will deepen your appreciation of and respect for the hard-working Cajuns, who lived, loved and laughed Louisiana into its distinctive, food, music and cultural richness.

You will soon be able to tour the museum and meet these local families in The Blue Heron, a 10,000-square-foot event and educational center built to complement the architecture of the Cajun Heritage Museum.