LECOMPTE HIGH SCHOOL

If you want to imagine the life of the students in a school at the beginning of the last century... We enter through the library, introduce yourself and make the visit yourself, it is free and open to all. Librarians are available to give you any information, and they are very proud of it. This former school of the Rapids parish dates back to 1924; it accommodated thousands of schoolchildren (aged 10 to 15) until 1967, when it was replaced in its role as the parish school by the Rapides High School. Threatened with total abandonment, it was saved in 1989 by a group of citizens who defended the idea of redeveloping it into a museum. Volunteers worked on its restoration and collected objects from everyday life in the 19th and early 20th centuries to supply the museum. We visit the auditorium, where the schoolchildren did their end-of-year shows, the conference room, the classes, the agricultural museum, the civil war museum with the names of the soldiers of the parish displayed on the wall as a paper memorial... There is still the bar of a saloon dating from 1897. All the exhibits and numerous photographs are donations from the parish residents who attended this school. You will learn that "playing hooky" is to cut school. The mascot of the museum is a horse, the Lecompte horse, born in 1850 and chosen by the mayor as the representative of the town. His statue is on the ground floor (that of the horse, not the mayor!).